The Outside Club

By Jeff Baker

Payden grew up in a town that retreated inside to a virtual life of computers, tablets, and phones. Over a decade ago, two children mysteriously disappeared from small town Manger. The case remains unsolved. For the generation of kids who followed, known as the "insurance children," that seemed normal. Separated from sunshine, fresh air, green grass, and each other, "the insurance children" don't even know what they're missing - until Minka comes to town. She inspires Payden to step outside his walls and join her in the outside world, and the other children soon follow. Mobs of kids are soon enjoying kickball, hide and seek, Sardines, and time together. Yet the Manger mystery still looms, and perhaps everyone underestimated the danger that still lurks in the shadows.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781667876009

Book preview

1

Manger, Kentucky is a geologic bowl — a place born of collision. That bowl was formed when a 100-meter asteroid collided with the earth 300 million years before I was born, roughly. At least that’s what scientists think happened. Appalachian Mountains form the rim that defines Manger’s boundary. That rim is now chipped away in places where heavy machinery collided with the tons of soil that concealed seams of valuable combustible carbon.

When our story takes place, we were a four-stoplight town with hundred-year-old brick store fronts. That hasn’t changed. At the time, the newest building in Manger was a Dollar General Store with its offending yellow neon letters that didn’t belong, but even that building was older than me. Nothing new had cropped up in Manger my whole life. Places shut down. Buildings got torn down, but nothing new got built. All the houses were old, having mostly been built in the first seven decades of the 1900s. We were like the setting of Season 1 of Stranger Things plopped down into a giant basin. In the town center the streets of Manger are mostly flat. As you move towards the perimeter of town the streets become steeper until you reach the dramatic ascension up to Manger’s defiled rim.

Assuming the asteroid hypothesis is true, that means the town is sprinkled with alien matter. When I first pondered that odd fact, I concluded that more than my fair share of those alien atoms had engineered themselves into my physical structure and personality. Apart from alien matter, there was nothing particularly striking about me physically. Average height. Average brown hair. Average brown eyes. Average nose. Average chin. I figured no one looked at me and thought: Wow, what a hunk. But, at least I hoped, no one looked at me either and thought: Ooh gross. I was pleasant. I’d come to that conclusion the day I first met her. Afterwards, I stared into a mirror and scrutinized my own appearance for really the very first time. Average. I was exceptionally average. Until then, it hadn’t mattered what the corporeal figure staring back at me in that mirror looked like. Until then, I’d existed in my social world only as various avatars.

In the two months on either side of my own birth, two hundred and sixty-seven other children were born in Manger. There were more children born in those four months than were born in Manger in either the five-year period before or the five-year period afterwards. Women from nineteen to forty-nine bore a child in that fertile period. At least one child. There were two sets of twins. The children of Manger’s micro baby boom were conceived in the first few months after that summer’s tragic disappearances. For that reason, an editorialist at the Manger Herald had dubbed us the insurance cohort. According to that explanation of Manger’s boom, I existed only to serve as genetic indemnity in case anyone snatched up my three years older sister, Elise. Elise frequently reminded me that Indeed, all the world’s a stage, Payden, but your only purpose for being a part of this globe is to serve as my understudy. Funny girl. Not funny as in ha ha funny.

The insurance children branding never resonated with me. It suggested that people are a fungible commodity. People are not potatoes.

Where some people saw fast-moving clouds, I saw alien spacecraft invading. Where some people saw a cave tunnel, I saw a systolic bowel. Where some people heard a teacher standing at the front of the classroom instructing, I heard a secret agent outlining my undercover mission. Where some people saw schoolmates, I saw treacherous enemy forces. Where some people saw trees, I tilted at giants. As a kid, I had a nearly psychotic imagination. Not much has changed.

For the first thirteen years of my life, most of that imagination was confined to my bedroom and the online world. That’s because after the disappearances in Manger, and, so, since before my birth, the people in Manger stayed inside. No one climbed on the slides, swing sets, or jungle gym at the park. No one leisurely rode a bike around town. The tennis courts were deserted. The soccer field was deserted. Manger couldn’t field a single little league team after the disappearances. Despite a contentious battle between coaches and Manger moms, even school sports dwindled away. Both Manger Middle School and Manger High School ceased fielding football, basketball, baseball, or any other sports teams.

What did the people in Manger do post the disappearances? They lived their lives on screens. We were on social media. We played video games. We surfed the internet. By the time I was in school, everyone had a tablet. We existed most extensively in the digital world. The natural physical world was largely seen as a necessary annoyance, and a dangerous one at that. Out there, you couldn’t hit reset. Out there, you couldn’t power off and power back on. Out there, you could disappear.

Kids went to school, but no one at school paired off. We didn’t group as the geeks, the mean girls, the jocks, the goths, the artsy types, or… how did it go? Brains, athletes, basket cases, princesses, or criminals. No such tribalism existed. That didn’t mean we were nice to each other. It meant that we were indifferent. We saved our tribalism for the internet, where such distinctions actually mattered. Walking down the school hallways, we were all way more absorbed by what and who was happening in our two-dimensional digital social universe than we were with the other blood and guts kids in our physical presence. Technology became a new umbilical cord, designed to never be cut. We were never alone, but we were also never really together. And instead of bringing us nutrients, that cord sucked them out of us. Technology consumed us. We were being eaten alive, gnawed at on a daily basis.

It was only by binging movies on my tablet that I figured out that we were somehow different. My father exposed me and my sister to the 1980s coming of age movies of his youth that he had loved so much — movies like The Breakfast Club, Pretty in Pink, Say Anything, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. I watched each of those movies at least five times. I was fascinated with the lives of those characters. Those movies were where I learned that all of Gen Z was aberrant. That fact made Manger’s Generation Z, with our near complete avoidance of the outside world, a kind of nested aberrant. We were aberrant X aberrant. We were aberrant².

I’m sure that no other town in the world would’ve reacted to the disappearance of two children in the extreme way that Manger did, but Manger, Kentucky wasn’t like most towns. It never was. We had that alien matter. Manger sent no soldiers to the Civil War — either side. Manger didn’t wait on the rest of the country to desegregate its schools or its housing or its churches or its water fountains. One hundred percent of Manger’s women participated in the suffrage movement. The rates at which women in Manger went to college outpaced other places. Manger didn’t prohibit during prohibition, and we were so out of the way that the Feds didn’t seem to care or maybe they didn’t even notice. Manger was never a red district or a blue district politically; we switched colors like a cuttlefish, depending on the current environment and the character and pragmatics of the persons running. Half the adult male population of Manger died in WWII, but none in Vietnam. Before the disappearances, the people of Manger were said to be oddly close knit, like a family — an enmeshed dysfunctional family my father used to say. After the disappearances, that all changed, except for the dysfunction.

As a town we didn’t think we were better or worse than any other town, just different, a little bit alien.

I logged my movie watching one year. As a twelve-year-old, I saw two hundred sixty-eight movies, one for each member of the insurance cohort. Among the two hundred sixty-eight, I ticked off each of the American Film Institute’s The 100 Greatest American Movies of All Time in descending order. I must admit, the greatness of some of those movies was lost on me. I watched everything from Chaplin’s The Gold Rush to The Goonies to The Big Lebowski to The Godfather. No one monitored the titles I watched. My mom simply said about my moving watching: If you have any questions or wanna talk about anything you see in those movies, just let me know. I’m happy to discuss whatever you want. There was no need to discuss anything with my mother. Google or YouTube answered every question I had.

In addition to binging movies, I was also a binge reader. Reading, I favored Harry Potter and anything Stephen King (from my mom’s fiction collection). After finishing IT, I had nightmares for two weeks solid. Those two weeks I was happy to not go outside and play on Manger’s streets with those wicked sewer drains where everybody floats. For a long time afterwards, I wouldn’t dally an extra second at the toilet. Pennywise lurked.

Kids weren’t the only Mangerites who stayed inside. Grown-ups in Manger didn’t gather outdoors either. When I first viewed the movie Zombieland I thought it was an apt allegory for the town of Manger (sans all the rampant flesh eating). No one in Manger walked their neighborhood, stood in the street exchanging gossip with a neighbor, gathered at the post office or any lunch counter or coffee shop. Too many of the grown-ups stayed inside smoking a potent strain of marijuana grown illegally in the county. A few were said to be popping opiate pills that were trafficked with the aid of Sheriff Higgins’ intentional blind eye. He had allegedly grown wealthy from the kickbacks. The sheriff was also suspected of taking hush money from the marijuana growers. The recent addition to his house more than doubled its size. His much younger second wife drove around town in a convertible Mercedes-Benz, even though the official household income was barely above the national poverty line. I saw her driving that car once when I was staring out of a school window during English class. I decided that her behavior was what the word audacity on that week’s vocabulary list was invented for. But no one in Manger seemed to care about any of that.

Don’t get me wrong. People did go outside. They mowed their grass, then went immediately back inside. They got in their cars, went to the grocery store, and then came home. They didn’t speak to anyone at the grocery, and the clerks didn’t say much more than That’ll be seventy-eight fifty-five. There was no Thank you for your business. No Have a nice day. Again, I only learned about such niceties watching movies on my tablet and by the one Manger exception to the no pleasantries rule. Her name was Cyrene.

Cyrene Pena ran a custard stand that had existed in Manger for almost twenty years. Cyrene (no one called her Ms. Pena) was a widow and was the friendliest resident in Manger. She remained friendly all those years when everyone else in the town turned inward. Cyrene lived, while the rest of Manger expired. The rumor was that Cyrene had spent her early adulthood in the Peace Corps. Stints in South America and in New Guinea, that was the rumor. She was just one of those naturally friendly people. Cyrene married young and was widowed young. No one knew the details. She wasn’t from the area originally and had chosen quaint little Manger for her new home almost at random, not quite a blindfolded throw of a dart at the map, but something similar. My dad had heard Cyrene’s origin story at one point in time and had shared it with me at another point in time. In addition to custard, Cyrene’s sold hot dogs that had a chili that was to die for. Most of my allowance went to Cyrene. People drove (even if it was just a few blocks) to Cyrene’s for hot dogs or custard, but they ignored the outdoor seating in favor of getting back in their cars and driving straight home. Cyrene would at least say, Thanks for stopping by. Enjoy that custard now, will you? I never heard anyone answer her back.

There was also an exception to Manger’s flight indoors. Edward Greer was outside all the time. Edward had a full head of long red hair and freckles that were winning the pigmentation war raging across Edward’s epidermis. His eyes were brown, distant, and deranged, like he was entertaining thoughts impenetrable to the rest of us. Everyone knew Edward Greer as Slow Eddie. My father said the nickname was an unkind play on a Paul Newman character in a movie we watched together. Eddie had turned inward before the rest of the town and in an entirely different manner. He had suffered a head injury in a mining accident and was either challenged or, my father figured, certifiably insane. Eddie lived outside, literally, in a lean-to somewhere on the edge of town, even though he was rumored to have banked a high six-figure settlement from the mining company. Eddie walked the streets day and night, always with a two-pound dumbbell in each hand. He was an exercise machine. He used the dumbbells for perpetual chest crossovers. As he walked the streets, he mumbled the same words over and over, Manger lived up to her name. He’d been mumbling that since right around the time the first child disappeared the summer before I was born. I’d seen and heard Eddie up close and personal only once, at Cyrene’s. He’d mumbled those words right at me, Manger lived up to her name. It took all the self-discipline I could muster, and a mother pulling so hard on my collar that I was practically choked into unconsciousness, to keep me from asking, Eddie, what exactly do you mean by that? As far as I know, no one else asked Eddie that question.

The disappearances left a fatalistic pall over once tight-knit Manger, stole the life of the once vibrant town, but it was like no one noticed. I guess sometimes you don’t know something has slowly died until you see it come alive again.

I wasn’t afraid to go outside (other than those first two weeks after I finished Stephen King’s IT). Going outside just never felt like an option in Manger. Yet, I knew something was missing from my life. Even before I watched all those 1980’s coming of age movies, I felt an emptiness. I made some friends online. We debated the relative merits of the DC versus Marvel universes. We shared drawing tips and story ideas for web comics and SCPs. Still, I always had the feeling that my life hadn’t really started. I didn’t know what I was waiting on until the day that she came to town and invited me to join her crusade. Until that day, my life was lived only between the neurons housed in my skull and their stimulation by external sensory programs of one and zeros.

When I was 7 years old, I started composing my own comic books. I sat in my room dreaming up new superheroes. They were all, of course, extremely lame. There was the Man of Heal who could mend the sick. I suppose that superhero idea came from growing up with a father who had a chip on his shoulder over missing half a leg. He’d cut himself chopping firewood with an ax and refused to go to the hospital until it was too late. Gangrene had set in. The doctors were forced to amputate his left leg six inches above the knee. That was just after Elise’s second birthday. Her understudy hadn’t yet been conceived.

As a young man my father attended Eastern Kentucky University, but after two years he ran out of tuition money. Hoping to save up enough money to finish his last two years of college and secure that B.A. degree in journalism, he got a job in the local coal mines. He made so much money reshaping mountains to extract combustible carbon that it was hard for him to quit the mines and go back to university. For seventeen years, he worked as a highwall miner operator for Syanch Coal Company. He worked the mines until the year before he lost his left leg. By then, all the economically feasible coal had been mined out of the surrounding mountains. He was let go from Syanch. After that, he had had a few temporary online selling jobs, but, mostly, he couldn’t find work. Journalism, his first love, was a fading profession and so he opted not to go back and finish that degree.

Before the accident, my father was an avid runner and tennis player. I never knew my father with two healthy legs. I never saw him play tennis. I never saw him run. The prosthetics he was fitted with didn’t satisfy him. My mom told him a hundred times that he wasn’t trying hard enough. She told me a hundred times that he was just bitter that he’d worked around all those dangerous mining machines and in all those dangerous locations for almost twenty years but lost his leg in a careless accident in his own backyard. The loss changed him, Mom said, and that before the amputation he had the happiest laugh you can imagine. I never heard that laugh either.

Anyway, at age 9, I imagined a Man of Heal who could fix my father’s missing half of a leg and fix his broken laugh.

Later, I thought up Hell’s Fury. Hell’s Fury was a superhero who caught evil people and imprisoned them in a hollowed out subterranean labyrinth that served as his lair. There, he tortured his captured villains with steel surgical instruments, not only until they confessed their sins, but until they truly saw in their hearts the error of their ways. Then, Hell’s Fury set them free. I don’t know the psychology behind my creation of Hell’s Fury — too many unsupervised movies streamed over that tablet, I suppose. Or, maybe, I secretly wanted to torture someone.

My most embarrassing creation by far was Cupidity. Yes, I now know that word has an entirely different meaning. Yes, it fittingly rhymes with stupidity, and, yes, Cupidity’s superpower was exactly as you would guess. He caused people to fall in love, or out of love. I was eleven when I created Cupidity. That psychology was obvious. There was a direct line of derivation between reruns of Boy Meets World, a certain Topanga Lawrence, and my creation of Cupidity. However, the more I elaborated the dimensions and exploits of the Cupidity character, the more I debated in my own mind whether such a species should be cast as superhero or as supervillain.

After age eleven I became fatherless. I was awakened by screaming one night. Mom and dad were fighting. They would frequently squabble, but I’d never heard anything like this.

"You prefer that to having sex with your own wife!"

The tone and volume of my parents’ voices terrified me more than their words did. I lay frozen in bed.

That’s ’cause those women aren’t constantly criticizing me!

Of course, those women aren’t criticizing you! Those women aren’t real! They’re your two-dimensional fantasy! Trust me, if they really knew you, they’d have plenty to criticize!

Fuck you, Susan! That’s exactly what I’m talking about! Why would I have sex with someone who never has a nice thing to say about me?!

When was the last time you even applied for a job?!

What job is there to apply for in this god forsaken hell hole?! Show me just one!

Have you even looked?!

Give me back the computer, Susan! I will look, again!

I’ll never give you back this computer! I paid for it!

Then how am I supposed to look for a job?! Give it back!

Never!

Goddamnit, give me the computer!

Crash!

Have you lost your fucking mind?! You threw my computer through the goddamn window! Who’s gonna fix the goddamn window, Susan?!

Maybe you should ask Miss Triple Ds to replace the window!

My chest felt as if it wanted to split in two. It was as if I was the one under attack, as if my life was being somehow threatened, threatened by one of those monsters Stephen King wrote about. I pulled the covers over my head and tried to hide myself from my parents’ antipathy towards each other. Under those covers, once the screaming stopped, I could hear my fear echoing.

The next day Elise came into my room.

About last night, did you hear—

I don’t wanna talk about it, Elise.

But if—

I don’t wanna talk about it, I said.

Fine. I was just trying—

Well, don’t try.

I went back to my comic book, Hell’s Fury.

Elise got the message, turned, huffed, and left.

After that night, the tension between my mom and dad was heavier than usual. I perceived a lot of put-on politeness as a show for me and Elise. Neither of us were tuning into that channel. The acting was more upsetting to me than the actual yelling. At least the yelling was real. At least it was true. At least I was sure what it meant. Fighting was trying.

My mom knew I’d heard the yelling, but she never spoke to me about it. My father knew I’d heard the yelling, but he never spoke to me about it. They need not. There were videos online I could watch if I wanted answers about marital strife or the perils of internet porn.

Early in the morning, about two months later, Elise was back in my room, this time shaking me.

Are you awake, Payden?

I am now. Why are you here?

Dad’s gone.

Where’d he go?

He left us. Took some of his things and left us.

A tiny explosion went