Tracey stood in front of the bulletin board in the back of Osaka-ya and stared at the posted shift list tacked up next to the list of employees phone numbers. Normally it would be a list of who was in what position for the day, one of the leads usually made it up, it set your fate for the next six to eight hours. Hostess, waitress, fryer, bus boy. But this particular version listed each of their names broken off into groups of two or three and was dated for the weekend that the white supremacist rally would be held in Libertyville. With the induction of Tracey, all Osaka-ya employees now belonged to Antony, and now the work from the basement was making its way up into the daylight, onto the bulletin board next to the break room.
“Sup Trace?” Trent patted her shoulders as he walked past her into the break room and reached for a hair net from the box that they kept on a top shelf in the cramped room. The break room was little more than a storage closet with a counter along one wall and a single stool for someone to sit on during their fifteen minutes of lunch.
“So, like,” Tracey pointed up at the shift list and looked over to Trent. He was attempting to shove all of his hair, which was quite long and a dirty straw color, into the hair net. “What does this mean, exactly?” Tracey looked back at the shift list and found her name next to Antony and Kelly's. Her stomach tightened a little. The less time she had to spend directly next to Antony was better. Not to mention that the last time she had been around Kelly, Kelly had wanted to rip Tracey's head off by the roots of her bleached and damaged blonde hair for a simple mistake. It was crazy what just a weekend and a cult could do to your friendships.
Trent shuffled out of the break room and looked over the shift list for the first time, whispering a soft yes, when he saw Jodi's name coupled with his.
“Teams.”
“Teams?”
“Yeah, for, well you know.”
Tracey stared at her name in twelve point Garamond. Tracey Lamki. It felt disgustingly official. One tiny, unremarkable step after the other had lead her here, to the edge of a cliff overlooking murder and conspiracy. When she tried to look back at it and find the exact place she should have said no, she couldn't. It hadn't been like that, like decisions to make, rather it had all felt inevitable. It was surprisingly easy to convince young, bright, debt ridden twenty-somethings that death wasn't such a radical notion. Of course it didn't start with death, it never does. It started with a job at a local yakiniku restaurant and then suddenly...
Trent was in the kitchen pulling out portions of noodles and dumping them into the large boiling vats to be cooked. Kory, their other cook, sat on the counter and shoved a cold wonton into his mouth, crumbs falling onto his apron and then onto the floor.
“Bro, hand me one of those,” Trent reached for the bucket of wontons—which were leftovers from yesterday's dinner buffet and Kory pulled it away from him.
“Dude, finders keepers.”
Kelly was in the manager's office with her feet up on the desk flipping through today's Daily Herald. There was a telling story on the front page. The gruesome murder of local sports coach Eric Hansen had just been discovered. She looked up from the paper and glared at Tracey.
“What do you want?” Kelly ground out, bitterly annoyed.
“Nothing! Jesus.” Tracey wandered to the front of the restaurant and sat down in a booth near the hostess counter. Outside the avenue was empty. There were no customers yet today, and it was just the four of them scheduled for the opening shift.
The bell above the front door rang and Linh breezed through straight to the back looking for Kelly. Tracey half stood up but let Linh go on her way without a word. Kelly could handle Linh. Tracey didn't need another reason to get in trouble. She sunk back into the booth and tapped her nails on the table, staring off into the distance, the shift list rolling through her mind.
“Coach Hansen was murdered.” Linh stood in the doorway of the managers office wide eyed, clutching her phone in her hand and showing Kelly the screen where she had just heard the news in a Facebook group chat with the rest of her team. Kelly carefully folded the newspaper back up and laid it down on the desk front page down.
“I heard.”
“Stabbed to death. In his kitchen.” Linh looked like she was on the verge of tears. She walked forward and slumped into the chair in front of the desk, staring off into the space in front of her without really looking at anything, even Kelly.
Kelly stood up and walked to the door, slowly clicking it shut and then placing her hands on Linh's shoulders.
“He was such a jerk of a coach,” Kelly said, her voice soft and small in that office in the back of the restaurant.
Linh whipped around and looked up at Kelly incredulously. “He was murdered!” Linh burst into tears. She was disheveled, as if she had just woken up, checked her phone, and wandered zombie-like out into the world to find a friend. She wore an old Loyola tee that was crumbled and Kelly recognized it as her usual sleeping shirt. Over it she had pulled on a Nike track jacket, wore Loyola sweats and white sneakers. Her hair was in a pony tail but instead of expertly pulled back and held together with bobby pins and a headband it was coming out all along the edges and there was a chunk of hair left behind at her neck, about an inch that Kelly reached for to smooth back.
Linh mumbled into Kelly's stomach as she stood behind her. “We were supposed,” a hiccup, “to have practice..” and the rest of her words fell into a blubbering mess in the dirty, grease stained carpet of the manager's office.
Kelly rubbed a hand gently in circles on her back and smiled. “I was thinking, since you won't have practice tonight, we could make some popcorn and watch a movie tonight? I got that part I was telling you about, and I found this kid's old movies on YouTube. They look hilariously bad. Like a date, we haven't had a date in a while.”
Tracey stood in the entry to the kitchen and watched Kory prep a plate for the day's first customers. Trent was digging around in the cooler for more wontons since Kory had eaten the rest of that bucket.
“You ever wonder why it's a Japanese restaurant that serves a mix of Korean and Chinese food and is run by a white guy?” Trent reappeared in the kitchen with a second bucket of wontons, taking a bite into one with a satisfied grin. Tracey scrunched her nose up in disgust.
“It's a front, it doesn't matter,” Kory replied.
“Yeah, but like, did he run out of ideas or?”
“What do you mean it's a front?” Tracey asked. She edged over to Trent and peered into his bucket of day old wontons.
“Want one?”
“No.”
“Antony Men-in-skiii is not an Asian cuisine connoisseur, you thought he was?”
“No, of course not” Tracey huffed.
Kory raised his eyebrows and shoved the completed plate into her hands.
She backtracked. “He's not?” Tracey balanced the plate in her left hand and grabbed for the pitcher of water she had left on the counter.
“He's polish.”
“So?”
“Yeah man, wontons, pierogi, same thing.”
Trent and Kory shared a grin, and Trent took another large bite of wonton, speaking with his mouth full, “basically.” Tracey rolled her eyes and left the kitchen to take care of her table. She slid the plate down onto the table and refilled their glasses of ice water, reaching down to fire up the grill as she did so. The flames licked the metal grate and the elderly couple both simultaneously sat back in their seats a little bit. Tracey smiled politely and turned the grill down and asked if they needed anything else. Both shook their heads in silence and Tracey left them to their meal. She walked in on Trent and Kory whispering to each other hurriedly, hunched over the counter.
“Okay, can you just explain it to me—straight forward, no code words...no flirting.” Tracey stared at them, serious about wanting to get it all out in the open. She hadn't really been around long enough to understand all of the moving pieces, everyday things got more and more confusing.
Kory looked behind Tracey to the seating area beyond, scanning for customers.
“It's just the old folks and they're like half deaf,” Tracey set the water pitcher on the counter and pulled screeching into the kitchen the stool from the break room, sat herself on it and crossed her arms.
“Alright, well, I mean, what do we do here?” Kory asked.
“Serve raw meat on a platter to customers to cook themselves over an almost open flame and hope they don't get salmonella?” Tracey offered. Trent snorted.
“What do we really do here?”
Tracey's voice caught in her throat.
“Say it. Out loud.”
Tracey rolled her eyes. “That's not what I asked YOU, Kory.”
“If you don't say it out loud then you're too stupid to have ever joined this group because you're in over your head.”
“We kill Nazis.” Tracey knew that objectively ridding the world of Nazis wasn't exactly a horrible thing but over the last couple of weeks the words had turned to bile in her throat.
Kory spread out his hands in a tah-dah motion and slapped them back on his thighs.
“That literally doesn't explain anything,” Tracey said exasperated with the whole damn thing. “I'm a waitress.”
“Who joined a cult.”
“Bro, don't say that word.”
“Bro, that's what it is.”
“Is Antifa a cult?”
“No, but we're not Antifa. We're a cult.”
“You're fucked in the head man.”
“You've chopped up a body on that table over there, so don't tell me I'm the one whose fucked.”
Trent looked Kory up and down as if he was analyzing whether or not he could take him.
“And Kelly killed a man two days ago and no one knows why but we cleaned it up.” Kory continued. “It's a cult.”
Tracey felt the bile in her throat start to bubble and wanted to throw up all over the gray tile of the kitchen.
“You keep saying that, but like, no one joins a cult knowing it's a cult,” Trent sat back against the counter contemplative.
“I believed in the message, don't you?”
Trent huffed. He didn't know anymore. He hated Nazis as much as the next millennial, but Antony had a weird way of blurring the lines.
“What's the message?” Tracey's small voice spoke up.
Kory and Trent looked over at Tracey.
“You mean no one's ever told you?”
“What that Nazi's are bad, yeah I got that.”
“No no no, that's not—that's not what this is about,” Kory smiled. “It's doomsday. It's a-comin'.”
Antony Meninski had trouble keeping his dates correct. He was convinced that the world would end on August 2nd, 1987. This just happened to be the date that Debra Joy Thompson married Richard Lowell Miller in Morton park, at three in the afternoon, before a gathering of fifty close friends and relatives. Except it didn't end. Debra married Richard and they held their reception in the basement of the VFW. That evening, before they retired to their martial bed, Richard and his groomsmen went out into the woods to celebrate. They did not wear their robes, but they went to their usual meeting place, a clearing were an ancient oak tree stood. It had one reaching, thick branch that jutted out and over the clearing and which was high above the ground and heavy enough to hang a man. And they drank to Richard, to the night ahead of him, to family and success.
Antony pushed the date out, for doomsday.
But if there was anything inexorably true in this world, it was that the end of it would be bloody. Of that Antony was always certain. The race war would be fought and it would be catastrophic. Doomsday was the day on which this race war would be initiated. It was the day that the Order of the Rose would assume their true form and shed their white robes and walk out into the day light that gleamed off of their scales and begin the genocide of the impure.
Wait. That sounds crazy. Some backstory...
In the time just before the Crusades an alien race landed on Earth and infiltrated it's most powerful offices. They assumed the visage of human men and made Earth home. There have been many theories that have come close to the truth of this alien race, the most popular of which call them the Reptilians, Serpent Men, but what they are called doesn't matter. Their purpose is to initiate and inspire the eradication of the impure of the human race so that Earth can join the other planets in the higher realm of the universe where only intelligent creatures roam. They are laying in wait for their chance. They've had a few chances, over the centuries, but all have fallen short. So they've kept quiet, kept to hidden places where they can grow and learn from their past mistakes. Time and time again they have misjudged the human race and it's ability to stamp out what it's primitive reasoning calls evil. And they won't let it happen again.
Like any story of heroes told to young men, this one inspired Antony to be more than what he was. He joined the Order of the Rose as it existed under the reign of men who had taken up the legend for themselves and carried out their own genocide of the impure. There's a lot of ways to justify your actions to yourself, no matter how disturbing, no matter how warped through time they have become.
But it was always just a story, until he met her.
Debra. A blue eyed, blonde bombshell in her heyday. Antony saw her at all of the meetings, always with her arm in his, Dick's. And one day Dick saw him looking and the next meeting they had scattered his family history across a table in the VFW and found him one quarter impure, and he had to leave or fear the worst.
And once he left he found clarity. Antony saw now the truth of these men and the stories they told. Antony saw their corruption of Debra and the others. Antony had been chosen, he knew now, chosen by that very alien race in the books of his childhood to usher in the new world order after the blood ran in the rivers and the scorched earth breathed new, clean life.
“That doesn't make any sense,” Tracey whined.
“It makes all the sense in the world.”
“What?”
“When the Order of the Rose at last convene again they will reveal their true alien forms and initiate genocide. Classic white supremacist agenda just add aliens. The rally in Libertyville, right? But once they do the race war will start because humans don't just not fight back.”
“So what happens then?”
“The world economy collapses, governments are overthrown, chaos.”
“But where does that leave us?”
“We're with Antony, the chosen one. We're going to do what we can to get rid of the big ones—Richard Miller for starters—and then Antony will take us to the promised land, so to speak, where we will wait for the end of the race war, for the dust to settle, and then Antony will lead us to the higher realm because we out intelligence-d the intelligent ones.”
“You're fucking kidding me.” Tracey stood up from the stool and violently grabbed the pitcher of water, the majority of its contents spilling over onto the ground.
Trent casually looked over at Kory with a thoughtful expression. “Still doesn't explain the Japanese restaurant, just sayin'.”
To Be Continued...here.
For bonus content, become my patron at patreon.com/prismaticjill42
Comments
Post a Comment