“This way, my dear. I have such sights to show you,” Parker drawled, her grin widening.
Somehow, that felt more natural than her resting catlike grin. Not that that looked too out of place on her. Between the baggy black jeans, the black t-shirt with an overstylized rendition of a cartoon character I didn’t recognize, and what surely had to be an unhealthy number of pleather bracelets, she felt more like a character than a person. Still, there was a noticeable difference between her static smile and the one she just wore.
She led me down the hall and two flights of stairs, not saying anything more until we got to the lobby. She stopped me just short of the door. “Alright, Mr. Monroe, we got two options: I can either give you the run-of-the-mill ‘this is where everything is and is going to be from now till Revelations’ tour, or the one that makes you wish you’d paid more attention in Church,” she offered.
“Which one of those explains how and why I no longer have a bullet in me?” I asked dryly. I felt like I’d been hit with so much so fast that if I tried pushing back now, I’d just break something important.
“Oh that’s easy. Sickles dug it out of ya with a spoon before he gave you to me.” Said like the most ordinary thing in the world. She could have followed it with ‘And that’s why the sky is blue’ for all the tact she’d bothered with.
“… a spoon.”
“Yup. Normally you’re supposed to leave the bullet in, especially that close to an artery, cause just taking it out can make you bleed out faster, but dead is dead. So, which tour? Welcoming Committee or Unwelcoming Committee?” she asked again.
“Which one am I going to regret less?” I asked, not entirely wanting an answer.
“Well,” she started, then paused. “The ‘normal’” here she used really big air quotes, “tour makes the settling down forever part easier, but there’s some shit in the Twilight Zone version you really don’t want to learn the hard way. Personally, I recommend the second one, if only because I can tell it might take more than what you’ve had so far for this place to really sink in.”
I absolutely did not want to take the not-normal tour, but I’ve always been a firm believer in the idea that the more you put something off, the more room you’re giving it to fester and grow. “Fine, lead the way. I’m pretty much ready to believe anything right now, at least for a moment.”
I would soon regret those words.
-—
Parker’s first stop on the tour was a small coffee shop about a block down the road. Like a Starbucks for a town that couldn’t afford a Starbucks. We sat down outside at one of those metal tables that looked like they’d been welded together out of rebar and polished until they were deemed socially acceptable. There were a few other people at other tables, at varying stages into their morning coffee routine. I hadn’t opened my mouth to ask what the hell we were doing before there was a waitress at our table, notepad in hand. “Morning! What can I get for you?” she asked, in a pleasantly generic customer-service voice.
Parker spoke up first, just as quickly as the girl had shown up. “I’ll have a mocha, and this gentleman will have a black coffee,” she stated.
“Wait a mi-” I started to protest, but Parker held up a hand and cut me off.
“Excellent! I’ll be right back with that,” said the waitress, and walked off.
I was already confused, but not sure why. “Uh, Parker, thanks for the coffee, I think, but why did we stop at a corner cafe if you’re trying to show me the weird shit?”
She gave me a look, one that I think was meant to be serious, but again, her smile got in the way. “When she comes back, take a good look at her face. Just for a second or two. Say thanks for the coffee, and start drinking.”
“Won’t it be piping hot this early?”
“Just drink the coffee, Jhona. Trust me. Don’t stare too long, but get a good look,” she said firmly.
I just shook my head. “Fine, if you say-”
“Here you go!” the waitress said, and I damn near fell out of my chair.
“Jesus! You-” Parker coughed loudly. “-are really fast, thank you,” I finished, and took the cup she offered me. It was hot coffee, just like the millions of cups I’d drank in my life. There was a pause, before I remembered Parker told me to drink the coffee. I took a sip, and was surprised at how comfortable the temperature was. Still hot, but not enough I couldn’t drink it. “Thanks,” I said again, taking a look at the waitress. Her smile was nice, and I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.
Parker did much the same. “Thank you!” she said cheerfully, taking a sip of coffee. “We’re good for now,” she added, and the waitress nodded and walked away.
“Ok, you want to explain to me what that was about?” I asked once the girl had disappeared inside.
“What did she look like?” Parker asked.
“Do what?”
“The waitress. What did she look like? Hair color, skin color, eyes? Nose? What color was the hat?”
I found myself shaking my head again. “She was… her hair was…” and I found I had absolutely no answer. It was like trying to remember who sold me my socks in the first grade. Like the information was so inconsequential my brain had immediately deleted it. “What… is going on?”
“Lesson Number One: If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, flip a coin and it might be a duck. Not everything in Sheolton is… what it is. There’s roundabout four or five hundred real people in Sheolton, but this town functions like there’s maybe twice that. All of the ‘little people’ jobs, like waiters and stockroom guys and back-of-house cooks, the people you don’t really pay attention to unless they fuck something up? Most, if not all of them, are just… there, in this town. They exist to do that job, and nowhere else,” I could tell Parker was dead serious, even through the smile that I was now convinced was involuntary. “Some people think they used to be people, until they lost themselves to their work, literally. Others think the town made them, just to keep things running. Me? I think they are the town, learning how to be normal like us. They’re everywhere. And they really don’t respond well to people going off-script. You order food? You’ll get it. God knows where it came from or what it is you’re actually eating, but it’s there. Sure, we’ve got the farms and livestock, but mostly that’s just to make people not think about where the rest of it comes from. Also the farmer’s market is bitchin, but that’s part of the normal side of things.”
She could tell I had more questions, so she kept talking. “A lot of what you need to know about this town is better learned in a classroom than on a field trip, so I’m probably going to be dumping a lot of word salad on your head all day. If only because learning it first-hand means waking up in that hotel room again. Which is another thing: you’re probably going to die again. There’s a lot of freaky shit in this town, and almost all of it is some degree of lethal. It’s also almost entirely avoidable. There’s folks here who haven’t died in years, and a couple of dumbfucks who get killed once a week. Like these NPCs, I call them, like the waitress? Last dude who went ‘off-script’ didn’t drink his coffee because he was too wrapped up in the newspaper -don’t ask I’ll get there- got a pencil through his eye. NPCs see people who don’t follow the rules as glitches or something, and quickly ‘delete’ them.
“But again, that’s entirely avoidable. Just be polite, eat what you order, pay for your stuff, just go about your interactions with them like you would with any other person. Hell, sometimes you can even get away with yelling at them when something goes wrong: that’s part of the script. Just act natural, and don’t ignore them. Also don’t follow them into anything marked ‘employee only’. One guess why,” she said flatly.
I was starting to slip back into that reality-versus-expectation panic I’d had back at the Welcome to Sheolton sign, which was being wildly outvoted in the back of my head by the ‘don’t get stabbed by something pretending to be a person’ majority. “Hotel room?” I asked, part of my voice cracking.
Parker nodded. “Hotel room. Like I said, you’re probably going to die. Especially at first. Not everyone knows all the rules here, and there’s only so much heads up we can give you. I don’t even expect you to believe any of it at first, but I can’t in good conscience send you running blind into the streets. Don’t run blindly into the street,” she added, rather urgently. “It might be a small town, but traffic laws are a thing. And I’m not convinced that everything on the road is a car.”
“Right,” I said breathlessly. I was already getting a headache and I hadn’t even finished my coffee. It was pretty good coffee, though. “Ok, fake people, evil traffic, murder town. Setting that all aside, I have one really nagging question for you, and I apologize if it’s a bit too personal.”
Parker tilted her head, and her natural smile came back. “You wanna know about the grin, don’t you?”