The Analog Underground

By H.H. LELAND

In the year 2023, three 3D printed Priestcraft druids attempt to dominate an unsupecting midwestern public by way of weaponized psychopharmacological warfare. Who is behind this neffarious plot, what is the aim, and who, if anyone or anything can, will stop it?

• Language: English
• Publisher: H.H. LELAND
• Release date: Apr 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201221287

Book preview

MENS

No one left the restroom. Standing alone behind the register of the Come ‘n’ Go fuel and convenience store, Janny eyed from beneath her oversized franchise cap the vacant, shadowy hallway that lay in line with the row of video slot machines and past the wall of brightly lit refrigerators stocked with products. Just before three o’clock a.m., an unidentified figure had entered the place and made straight for the men’s room. Janny had not caught sight of the person, but was alerted by the triggered digital bell-tone of the building’s only entrance, followed by the subsequent closing of the facility’s door. Ensconced within and hidden for far longer than the unwritten, acceptable duration, the stranger’s nonpresence was now making Janny stand at nervous, rectified attention.

Abutting the store’s facade, two flanking stacks of blue windshield washer fluid were located on each side of the entry. Electric lottery signs radiated letters of red neon light through the plate-glass windows into a small measure of the enormous darkness outside. Tickets promoting chance good fortune were sold inside, as well as big, cold drinks with long straws—chips and nuts, candies and crackers. A square glass tower of vertically spaced, round pizza pans—each inserted into its own slot of a precisely engineered steel rack which rotated slowly—displayed dried pizza slices with dogfood sized nuggets of sausage buried beneath kilned mozzarella.

Who was probably a man had stolen past all of this, borne of the early morning emptiness, and slipped into one of two customer lavatories—a routine so common that Janny mostly ignored it. But in these cases, when a preordained duration of the clock elapses beyond mutual need, bringing no timely conclusion when it should, vigilance begins, and any peace of mind there may have been becomes supplanted by troubled contemplation. Such preoccupation dominated Janny now in the fluorescently lit and disquieted silence.

In order to dismiss doubtful yet persistent notions that she may not have noticed his or her departure, cognitive pings queried and investigated alternative explanations. But these were merely formalities, amounting to the following rendering of the interrogatives and their responses:

Had I myself been in the other restroom when he, she, it, they came in? No. Plus, it sure only sounded like one person, and barely even one at that. Was I in the office? No—I don’t have the keys. Did I miss his departure while helping myself to some pizza? No—because there is a chime that dings when the one-way door opens inward for those entering and when the door is opened again when they leave. Therefore, even if my back had been turned, she further reasoned, I should have heard the chime. What if it’s Josh who’s in there? No. He’d never do such a thing; he comes straight to me.

Such and more she gave thought to, and as expected, these pings echoed negative replies. Is someone really still in there?

Unavailingly, Janny waited and waited until she was forced to accept the singular, truthful answer; she knew with a certainty that she had failed to notice nothing and that there was indeed probably an unknown man in the restroom in her previously very empty store—a stranger who remained beyond the enormous selection of refrigerated beverages, past the walk-in storage coolers, and behind the thin, shut door painted with a glossy white mildew-resistant primer, the black and gold metal self-adhesive capital letters spelling—MENS—at eye-level, across from the floor-sink reeking from the grate and the dirty-grey cotton mop penetrated by a length of green garden hose attached with a bulging wad of duct tape to the faucet above—the mop’s head of thick, grimy hairs splaying about the ringer hitched by molded tines to the matching yellow plastic mop bucket canting diagonally because it was missing a wheel.

Josh! hissed Janny harshly into the telephone. She waited for the young manager at the other end to wake enough to respond.

There's a man! He went into the bathroom! And I’m pretty sure he's still in there! Janny kept her attention fixed on the hallway.

Maybe about a hour and forty-five minutes, she answered.

The unnoticed, monotonous decibels of the refrigerator motors and the magnetostrictive strain of 120 Hz transmitting from ceiling-light soffits acting as bandshells permeated the indoor space.

I know! she sang while still whispering. That’s why I'm callin'.

Silent, listening, not listening.

Look, she interrupted. I'm supposed to be gettin’ off in ten minutes, so... no!

She switched ears. Marian, yep. Mm-hmm. Well, I don't want to, that's why! she hissed. I don't get paid for no surprises at five in the mornin'!

She put the receiver to her breast and strained her ear to the hallway. Noting no change, she brought the ‘phone back to her mouth.

Shh! she spat. Listen. My shift’s just about over and you never showed and I ain’t goin’ down there.

Uh-huh. Well, you come in as soon as you can all you want—if it ain’t in ten minutes, it’ll be Marian who’s here and not me!

And whatever words the young manager, Josh, had begun replying with mattered little as Janny abruptly decided to end the call with a Never mind—Good-bye, punctuated by the clattering of the telephone’s plastic receiver being thrust unevenly into its cradle.

Janny was not particularly worried about paying for any insolence. She enjoyed a measure of equity which more than occasionally she delighted in earning and leveraging. In fact, it seemed to her that his frequent, solicitous, and amorous advances during the quiet, empty hours of her midnight shift ultimately inverted the power dynamics of employee and employer entirely in her favor.

When Josh pulled up in his sputtering, red Toyota Corolla All Trac Deluxe Wagon, a ribbon of pre-autumn morning sky was extending electric blue across the dark, Midwest horizon. Silhouetted windbreak bracken bordered the fields across the road where grackles leapt and zigzagged while feeding. Barn swallows that had not yet migrated swooped from their mud-packed nests in the store’s eaves. A cluster of six grey corn silos of tremendous girth that had fallen into disuse stood abandoned in the lot cater-corner from where the station tomcat crouched atop the outdoor ice-freezer.

Marian, who had relieved Janny at shift change, stood five feet tall, her brown hair splaying into equal tresses on either side of the standard issue corporate hat fitted with an Ocular-scan electrode ribbon, a technology enabling her or any trained wearer to use his or her eyes to scan barcodes for transmission to the computer register.

The red polo shirt with its yellow store logo located above one of two possibly fair breasts and the oversized khaki pants rumpled around the feminine curves that Josh sought to assess. She was a new hire, younger than Janny by more than a decade. He had not yet dared to brush the back of his hand against her fanny to gauge her response and interest. Recently, however, he had maneuvered to stock packs of cigarettes stored above her head as she stood at the register in front of him during a training day, and, on his toes, he tottered downward and into her with his pelvis, begging for her pardon. She had remained frozen to the spot, revealing nothing, so the chances remained fifty-fifty, to his way of thinking.

Mornin', miss Marian. Is whothehellever still in there?

I haven’t looked.

What about the cameras?

You have the keys to the office.

Well, then, tell me what’s goin’ on and where’s Janny?

Janny says she’s already told you that she’s pretty sure someone went in there and didn’t come out and that she didn’t go back to check. She left and no one’s mopped, Marian relayed in strident, chopped syllables. She studied him from beneath the awkwardly oversized Come ‘n’ Go cap.

Josh could not decide if she was bright or dumb. He had hired her a week ago to replace someone who had abruptly quit and because she was cute and quiet. He stood and looked indecisively out the large windows—his shoulders thin, a considerable excess of leather belt looping back to the first belt loop of his trousers. Outside, automobile traffic was beginning to thicken with the dawning of the day, which brought with it the promise of a steady flow of business.

We should probably call the sheriff I guess.

Marian picked up the landline receiver with the foul-smelling quadrilateral mouthpiece and struck the numbers embedded in the chassis, having consulted the list of telephone numbers and cryptic doodles taped to the side of the register entitled Emergency Numbers. As Josh waited, he slowly paced away a few steps and into the nearest aisle of goods and stopped. Saleable items on either side of him were packaged in glossy polymers. The fumes of the previous night’s intoxicants blurred them into a multicolored panoply of nauseous excess, a dizzying consumer carnival of sugar and varnished primary packaging and barcodes.

That mouthpiece smells, he recalled. It needs wiping.

He walked back, let himself behind the counter,