The Alligator Diner: A Shocker Fiction Series (5)

Part V: Lost in the Sauce

Previously : Sam and Meera’s commercial success continues. In the city of Yamasee, however, darker things are afoot: there may be a factory in town that experiments on humans.

I fell asleep and dreamed I was back at my old high school, but as a student. The actual teacher called me up to the board and the other students pelted me with mud that turned into scrambled egg as it hit me. In the back of the classroom my sister, Seema, looked on guiltily. She was dressed to the nines as usual, not a speck of lint on her entire outfit, suede shoes unscuffed, brows freshly threaded, hair flat-ironed into a glistening black curtain. She was trying to tell me something but I couldn’t hear so she took out a dry erase board and wrote: MOM AND DAD SAY HI. She flipped the board to show another message: THEY’RE ASHAMED OF YOU.

The other students saw the message and their hoots and jeers intensified. I went to hide under the desk. As I crouched underneath I smelled butter and heard sizzling. I looked down and realized I was in a frying pan. I looked up and saw Sam above me, giant, holding a proportionally giant pan on which I was being sautéed. He flipped me and I landed on the hot, buttery metal, suddenly naked. I screamed. He poked me with a fork. One of its tines pierced my skin and sank into me slowly.

“Never use a metal utensil on a nonstick pan! You taught me that!” I yelled. He slid the fork out of me and picked me up delicately between his thumb and index finger to deposit me on a plate. Then he grabbed a glass bottle and out spurted what I immediately knew wasn’t ketchup, but blood — and not human blood, alligator blood.

To cap it off, Sam doused me with whiskey. Singed and cold and dripping wet, I began to shiver. Sam produced a lighter from his pocket. He lit it and closed in on me with the flame.

“Why are you doing this?” I stammered.

“There’s a lot of things I can’t tell you, Meera.”

I begged him to stop, but he was undeterred as he proceeded to flambée me. Flames rose from me but I didn’t feel the heat; instead I grew to my normal human size, drawing energy from the flames. Meanwhile Sam started to take off his clothes, never taking his eyes off me. He stripped naked then unzipped his skin. Underneath appeared another man, this one fully clothed—my old friend Joe Pérez Ochoa. His square, pleasant face looked jaundiced and exhausted. He usually wore T-shirts and Members Only jackets, but he had a lab coat on now.

“Sorry for what I’m about to do, Meera. I have no choice. They’re making me do this,” he said. He gently placed a cap hooked up to electrodes on my head. “All signals are normal,” I heard someone say behind me. Then the electric shocks started. First a kind of twitch that merely startled me, then white-hot, lacerating pulses. I dissociated and saw myself from above, spasming like a hooked fish.

When the shocks stopped—maybe a minute later, maybe days later—I looked up and saw not Joe but the assistant principal of the high school where I’d taught, Milos “Mark” Draganovic, who was tall and slender, with dark hair and incredibly green eyes. He asked me to meet him in the teachers’ lounge so we could discuss the 11th graders’ field trip.

“The teachers’ lounge is gone. So is Eisenhower High School,” I said, shrinking back from him. He was looking at me, but he was decidedly not making eye contact.

“I guess we’ll just have to …talk right here, then,” Mark said, unbuckling his belt.

“No, no, aren’t you married?”

“Married to the job, for sure,” he answered, eyes twinkling. He, too, took off his clothes and slipped out of his skin; underneath was an alligator. It went straight for me, bit into my leg, and ripped it off without a second’s pause. I writhed in pain as blood spurted. That was when I woke up.

I opened my eyes and looked at the alarm clock on the shelf next to me. It was 3 PM. Panic. Why hadn’t my alarm gone off? Why hadn’t Sam woken me? I tried to scramble out of bed but I couldn’t move. I reached for the alarm clock, for my phone, but they were too far away. This couldn’t be happening.

The door opened and a backlit silhouette appeared. “I’m so sorry, Sam,” I said. “My alarm didn’t go off. Don’t fire me. Please.”

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. His voice sounded oddly cold. He knelt next to me on the mattress and leaned over to place his arm on the other side of me, his body framing mine. As our faces drew close I knew it wasn’t Sam. It was Mark. I saw Mark’s eyes glinting in the dark, smelled Mark’s smell. My stomach clenched. “I’m not that kind of boss,” he said. “I’m a cool boss. I’m very forgiving.”

I tried to squirm away, but he’d positioned himself so there was no way to do so without making a scene. “Come on, Meera. Relax. Don’t be uptight.” I tried to will him to go away. Was this a dream? Why would Mark be here? If I knew I was dreaming that was supposed to mean I could make it stop. But Mark was still there. It was like I had forgotten how to scream and push and kick and fight back; my mind was roiling with panic but my body couldn’t move. I tried to breathe and my throat seized up, choking on emptiness. His body was on top of mine, weighing down on me, and resisting was pointless. The world started to dissolve.

And then I really woke up. I almost wept from relief that I could move.

The alarm clock read 7 AM. I didn’t want to go back to sleep. Instead I slunk into the kitchen to wash my face, hands, and feet, and then prayed briefly in the room, under my breath, facing in approximately the right direction. I hadn’t prayed the dawn prayer since I was a child. The familiar gestures soothed me; the words came back slowly but surely. I wished I believed so that I could simply trust God had decided what was to happen and submit to his will. But I had never been able to believe in a higher power. Still, I felt lighter, more at peace.

It was Saturday, when I taught adult ESL for an hour at 9:30 in the basement of Our Lady of Sorrows church. I walked out the back door as Sam glided through the kitchen, scrambling eggs here and flipping home fries there, wielding his spatula almost too fast for the eye to follow.

The walk was 45 minutes. I could have driven but gas was expensive and if I walked fast it wasn’t too cold. I arrived early and helped to set up the free breakfast with some food from the diner’s pantry: sliced bread, oatmeal, peanut butter, bananas, tea.

The day’s ESL class was dedicated to the workplace: how to name and describe your job, work equipment, working conditions, what rights you have as a worker. (The class included a bricklayer, a welder, two carpenters, a nurse, a dishwasher, a hairdresser, an Uber driver, a hair braider, a barber, a fortune teller, a cashier at HEB, Spanish and Chinese teachers, housecleaners, an employee at a paleta shop, elder care helpers, an acupuncturist, a midwife, and a few who preferred not to say.) Class went by so quickly that the call to wrap up took me by surprise. Afterward, as I helped clear away tables and chairs, I sidled up to Vicky Luján, who’d been the part-time school nurse at Eisenhower High and was now an EMT. She was plugged into every community organizing effort. After a few pleasantries I asked her if she’d heard anything about Bio Solutions Inc.

“Maybe,” she said. “Do you need a ride?”

We left the building separately and met in the parking lot. Vicky was waiting in her dark red Chevy Lumina. After taking a look around to make sure we were alone, I ducked into the car. The passenger seat was so broken in that I felt like I could sink all the way into the floor. A miniature soccer ball dangled from the rear view mirror; underfoot were magazines and paperbacks, cassette tapes, and dozens of pocket-sized first aid kits.

I started to talk, but Vicky shushed me before starting the engine and firing up a CD. Shakira’s Dónde estan los ladrones? (her last album as a brunette) rang out at full volume. Vicky pulled out of the lot and took a circuitous route vaguely in the direction where I was going, doubling back and going in circles, frequently glancing in the rear view. After a few minutes she asked me what I knew. I told her about the kids at the diner, the inflated-sounding but strangely plausible things one of them had said.

“You know these kids?”

“I doubt I could contact them to check this story, if that’s what you’re asking. But does this confirm something you already know?”

“Oh yeah. The police are behind the disappearances and we’re pretty sure they’re working with Bio Solutions. A friend who works as a cleaner at the precinct has heard a few things.”

“I don’t know if I can ask, but is there anything to be done?”

“Glad you asked. If you could just keep your eyes and ears open at work, that could help a lot. And you have a low profile so if you have free space to store the occasional thing, that might be clutch. If you and Sami don’t mind.”

“Are things that bad? I’m happy to help. You know I’m a fellow traveler. But I seriously didn’t realize it was at the point of clandestine storage rooms and cloak and dagger shit. I’ve been trying to get by. I guess I was really out of the loop. I had no idea. ”

“I would never knock you for making a living, babe. Is that going OK, by the way?”

“My back and feet hurt all the time and the money’s whatever.”

“That’s restaurants for you. Is this Sami guy a decent person? I know he’s a…fellow traveler but that doesn’t mean much about him personally.”

“Yeah, I like him a lot.” She smiled. “Not like that! But he’s good. We split it all 50–50.”

“Nice. I’m happy you’re happy. Is business ok? It seemed a little empty.”

“The finances are fine, apparently. I’m not sure how.”

“Eh, you know the restaurant business, it’s always a little sketch. But yeah, to answer your question, things are pretty bad. Not that it was before, but this is fucked. I don’t know how much you know about the disappearances, but most of the people who vanished were community activists or leaders.”

“So you’re at risk too.”

“I guess I am.” We kept driving, Shakira filling the silence, until suddenly we arrived in front of Vinny’s.

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.

“You’re welcome. Now take a first aid kit.”

“I don’t want to take one unnecessarily.”

“Please just take one. You never know when you’ll need it.”

I scooped up a first aid kit from the floor, hugged Vicky goodbye and went inside. I opened the first aid kit to assess its contents and on the back of one of the band-aids was a label with a PGP key written on it. While Vicky’s paranoia suggested she and her comrades knew what they were doing, I was also starting to find it deeply unsettling. I sighed and went back to work.

To be continued…