Black Cat Weekly #81

Chapter 5-1

byYou have arrived at your destination.

You have arrived at your destination.Now I just needed to figure out what the hell I was doing at a ShopWright Center in the middle of Nowhere, Tennessee. The obvious answer was that this was where I’d been dispatched by my new employer, the mysterious Kinston Collective, but that didn’t answer the question of how I’d gotten there. I couldn’t seem to remember all the twists and turns the car or my life had taken to put me in the parking lot of a Podunk grocery center.

I should have turned around and cut my losses, except…for all the years I’d spent on the job, I didn’t have a lot to recommend me as a detective other than that I maintained my forward momentum. “Tamara Richardson sees things through,” my old partner, Kendal, used to tell people. As with most things, he was overly generous, but not wrong. Getting out of the car and marching into the grocery center wasn’t an act of bravery for me, or faith. It was just habit.

There was a bitterness to the day. When I coughed, as women of my age are apt to do, the cold burned my lungs. It was busy for a weekday, but that didn’t make it lively. Maybe it was all the gray and concrete, maybe it was the lack of the buzzing drones I’d grown so used to in the city, but the place felt dead.

“Hey, yo!” The voice came from the front of the line of cars waiting to pick up orders where a burly man slinging boxes waved in my direction.

“You can’t just rock up in here and snatch stuff off the shelves,” he said with far more confidence than a thirty-year-old grocery loader should have any right to. “You got to link your order in, then we pack it. You think this is a Veronamart or something, lady?”

Lady? That stung. The man was about half my age and probably couldn’t remember a time when people grocery shopped without having to factor in a tip, but still. I considered making a comment about his sloping forehead or the way his bulbous nose hung on his face like an afterthought, but I decided to play nice. I didn’t have even the dubious authority of a badge anymore.

“I’m here to see Timur Roth,” I told him and tapped the com rig on my wrist.

That made the guy pause, like the very concept of this Roth character having visitors never occurred to him. Shaking his head the entire time, the loader walked me to a steel double door and swiped me in with his own com rig.

A gust of warm air hit my face as the door opened. The inside of the blocky building smelled like cardboard and grease and rotting bananas.

“Down the hall, to the right, then up the stairs. He’s the only one on the floor.” The loader jogged back to the line of cars and started plucking boxes off the feed, just another cog in the machine. I almost didn’t catch the suspicious look he threw my way as the door swung shut. Suspicious…and worried. It was too cold out for the sheen on his Neanderthal’s forehead to be anything other than nervous sweat.

As advertised, there was a single person on the second floor manning a balcony overlooking a massive open grid of shelves and robots. Single as in solitary, though the description probably covered his relationship status, too. He filled every inch of the bucket chair that hovered in front of the control array. Even in the dim lights of an automated warehouse, his scalp shone through his thinning hair. It was an unfortunate look for someone so young. A splotchy beard decorated his round face, just barely thicker than the fuzz on the back of his neck. It was as though the man had been allotted an average amount of hair but had chosen to spread it across entirely too much real-estate.

“Timur Roth, I presume?”

He spun his chair and looked me up and down.

“You’re the new recruit, huh? The detective who stumbled through a Schechter Portal and lived to tell the tale? I thought you’d be younger.”

Jesus. First Gonk the Over-Age Grocery Loader, and now this unwashed nerd. I must have really looked like s**t.

“Life’s an unbroken chain of disappointments,” I told the greasy twenty-something. “You’ll find that out. Until then, I’m here for some sort of training.”

That seemed to stump him. “They didn’t tell you why they sent you down?”

“The Collective isn’t exactly expressive. They’ve thrown eight different instructors at me in the three months since I signed on. I’ve learned to just go with the flow.”

Roth’s smile didn’t have the mockery in it I’d been expecting, just a hint of commiseration. “Yeah, they’re like that, aren’t they?” He grabbed the edge of the console and pulled himself out of the chair. “Come on. No time like the present. We’ve got half an hour drive each way and they say it’s going to snow.”

I looked over the balcony railing at the warehouse floor. Wheeled robots zipped along glowing powerlines set in the polycrete floor, plucking items from ten-foot-tall shelves and rolling them into bins.

“What about all this?” I asked and waved at the console and the bustling operation occurring behind it. “Aren’t you working?”

“This?” The weird little man snorted. He slipped on a tufted coat that made him look like an overstuffed couch. “This is all automated,” he explained. “I’m just a system’s manager. They only need me if it breaks down, and if that happens, I’d be out on my a*s anyway. Let’s get cracking.”

We exited through the double doors and crossed the parking deck to my rental. The queue of waiting cars had grown like a fat tapeworm, and boxes flew from the conveyer belt as fast as the team of loaders could move them.

“Three months, huh?” Roth said, apropos of nothing. “Did they test you in any aptitudes yet?”

Ah. Shop talk. At some point, Roth must have gone through an orientation with the Collective, too. Aptitudes were all the talk among the few other initiates I’d met.

“Yup,” I told him, trying and almost succeeding at keeping all the bitterness out of my voice. “Every last one they could think of.”

“And?”

“Not a drop of talent. No arcane sensitivity. No extra-temporal or dimensional perception. I’m not telekinetic or pyrokinetic or the least bit telepathic. Just a plain old, garden-variety woman. Dr. Whitlock said I was so ordinary that it was extraordinary.”

We reached the car, one of the new Subarus with sliding doors. I was about to get in when I noticed Roth had stopped short. He dug his hands into his coat pockets and stared at me over the roof of the car.

“Oh, well, uh,” he said, “don’t take this the wrong way, but why are you here? This work…you need to be special to do it.”

Five minutes in, and he’d hit on the very thing that had been eating at me.

“It’s a mystery to me,” I said as I climbed into the driver’s seat, “and I’m supposed to be the detective.” Roth wasn’t expecting me to keep moving and had to shuffle to get inside the car before I took off.

“What about you?” I asked him. “If you’re so special, what are you doing working at the ShopWright?”

He smiled sheepishly, dimples appearing in the gaps between his wispy mustache and his splotchy sideburns. Maybe it was his childish expression or maybe it was just seeing him outside the unflattering warehouse lights, but my opinion of Roth softened a bit.

“I’m not special,” he said as he typed an address into the autodrive. “Not very special. Just enough to f**k up my life. I’m an empath. Did they go over that with you yet?”

very“Yeah. You can read other people’s emotions, right? Tell when they’re upset or lying? I had a partner who could see through a suspect like a low-candela holo. It was eerie.” I hit engage on the system and leaned back as the car took us out of the lot and toward what passed for a highway in those parts.

Roth shrugged and rearranged his bulk in the confines of the vehicle cab.

“Yeah, well, your partner was probably good at reading facial expressions. That’s something different. Empaths pick up emotions whether we want to or not. I hear feelings like noise. Anger sounds like a baby’s scream, anxiety’s like a Doc Sar’va song, fear feels like ASMR to someone with misophonia. It’s okay if everyone’s happy, but how often does that happen nowadays?”

They didn’t tell me about that angle of being an empath, but it made sense.

The car beeped its protest at Roth not being belted in. Reluctantly, he tugged the seatbelt over his shoulder and snapped the buckle into its receiver. “It’s just easier to keep some space between me and crowds,” he said. “Most true empaths—the actives, not just the sensitives—don’t make it through adolescence. I’m one of the lucky few. The Collective plucked me out of a long-term mental support facility and trained me up. They set me up with this job, found me a place without neighbors.”

To my mind, his unique sensitivity only made him more valuable in the Collective’s “War with the Dark.” He was basically a human polygraph, and the mad bastards trying to poke holes in reality for profit and fun would be a lot easier to pick out if they couldn’t lie to us. Why would they waste someone like Roth with a nine-to-five? From what I’d seen, the group had plenty of funding. Over the last few weeks, I had visited various mansions, labs, and even a ski lodge owned by the Kinson Collective. The phrase “copious wealth” came to my mind.

“I thought someone like you’d be too busy running around busting ghosts,” I suggested. “I was led to believe there is a flat-out staffing shortage.”

Roth crossed and uncrossed his hands like he was waving off a delivery drone. “Yeah, that’s not me. I’m more of a part-timer.”

Again, my annoyance melted into pity for the guy. It must have been a hard life growing up that way, like walking through a briar patch with an exposed wound. Guilt crept up on my hardened heart, guilt for the way I’d treated him initially. None of this was his fault. And the facial hair wasn’t that bad. In a certain light, it looked almost attractive.

At that point, a thought occurred to me, sprouting from a kernel of information I’d been given by June, the mousy instructor at the Collective who’d taught me what little I knew about empaths.

“I seem to remember hearing that empaths didn’t just pick up on emotion,” I said pointedly. “Sometimes they can influence other people’s moods.”

Roth’s reply came out a murmur. “Sometimes some of us can.”

“Timur, is that you in the back of my head making me think you’re not a complete piece of s**t?”

“Maybe,” he said even quieter than before.

Roth’s left hand was resting on the center console. I patted it softly. “Okay. ‘A’ for effort. Now, can your special powers pick up on how I feel about you tinkering in my brain?”