Who: Miss Pauling What: Trial When: Extended trial night (May 4-7) Where: Violence circle Status: Narrative, Complete Warnings: VIOLENCE. Lots and lots of violence. Dehydration, extreme heat, heat exhaustion, blood, injury, murder, extensive murder, I cannot tag enough on the murder, bodies, disposal of bodies, death, firearms, assorted weapons, deliriousness and altered mental states, Miss Pauling being really okay with killing her friends, questioning of purpose
The desert looked almost like home. According to her schedule, tonight was trial night.
She had been brought back.
Miss Pauling dusted herself off and stood, peering around. The world was blurry. She felt around in the sand for her glasses, grabbing two hot rocks, half of a beer bottle, and a lizard before finally closing her hand around the smooth black frames.
A twinge of anxiety crawled in her gut--talking with Ms. Black about her fear of losing herself to the circles had somehow made it loom larger than ever.
Her clipboard was on the ground only a few feet away--she picked that up, too, and shook it free of sand. It had a new contract clipped to the front.
CONTRACT 99:
The name was smeared with fluid and grime. She tried to dab it off, but it made the paper no more legible. She closed her eyes, pressing a hand to her temple. Nobody could ever be relied on to be tidy. It made her job that much harder.
Maybe there was something around that could help her.
She peered around the desert, seeing nothing but the occasional gust of wind and rolling tumbleweed. Miss Pauling sighed again.
How was she supposed to pass these trials, if she didn’t know what she was supposed to do?
When she looked up a second time, she saw her moped conveniently parked two yards away, leaned against a cactus. Just like before. Her purple helmet was hanging from the handlebars.
“I guess it’s just you and me again, then, scooter.” Miss Pauling buckled the helmet under her chin and started the motor. At least it was something. “Let’s see if we find anything else.”
Similar to before, when she started to second-guess her path, she spotted a new feature in the desert. Two crates, squatting next to each other. She pulled up beside them and dismounted. The lids were stuck with sand, but after a good heave-ho, she was able to pry the tops off to reveal the crates’ contents. She was met with stacks of simple firearms--mostly force-a-natures- and another letter.
Kill the witnesses.
Just like the last two times.
She hefted one of the weapons and checked it with practiced expertise. There was a figure approaching, and she took aim. It dropped like a rock, its slumped silhouette becoming another feature on the desert’s flat horizon. She repeated the pattern with another, and another, until she lost count. Sweat rolled down her arms like raindrops under the beating sun. She could feel the thirst setting in; the adrenaline was wearing off with the monotony. Eventually, the final force-a-nature ran out of rounds. She scoured the crates again, finding nothing.
The next step was bodies. She needed to hide the bodies. With that, she put her helmet back on and drove to the now-significant heaps of corpses littering the desert. When she got closer, she could see that they were familiar figures. She felt nothing about that, and set to the grueling task of disposing of the evidence. It felt as though it took the better part of the day, and part of the night. She patted the final patch of sand flat and looked upon her handiwork. The desert looked…well, not quite untouched, but pretty good for what she had to hide.
She woke up in the scrublands. There was a clipboard sitting face-down, reflecting harsh sunlight. Sand crusted in her eyelashes again. It caught in the creases of her ears and under her hair. A fine film of brown dust covered her glasses. There was a new contract on her clipboard.
The entire routine repeated itself, again. Sometimes the names were familiar, other times they were not. Scout, Scout’s Mom, Engineer, the chicken girl from Teufort. Half of Whisper Way had come across her list, and the residents of Graphite Heights continued to make increasingly frequent appearances.
Each time Miss Pauling would climb onto her purple moped, strap on her helmet, and take off into the raging dust storms. There were different boxes of weapons every time--rocket launchers, sawed-off shotguns, chainsaws, crowbars. One memorable time, the crates had nothing in them at all.
Of course, she still made due. The sweat didn’t seem to dry with the nights in the desert--it seemed to pool, dripping off of her neck and down her back, the sand eventually started to change to a pinkish brown from all of her work. It began to smell, too, though just when she seemed to run out of space to put bodies, the desert would expand to find one more spot for her to use.
A splintered, scarlet-stained two-by-four slid out of her hands. Its rough edges had left deep gashes in her palms. Her vision swam as she fell to all fours. Her hands were numb, and she could barely feel the grains of sand cutting into the wounds.
The sun beat down.
“Why?” The word came out muttered, stumbling out between heaving breaths. “What is this all for?”
She scrabbled for the contract and scanned it for any indication, any barest hint of an answer. She could find nothing, just a list of names, more names. More names.
“I’ve done everything the administrator asked. Everything. I never questioned anything.” Miss Pauling was too tired to feel shame that she was outright talking to herself. The thirst had rubbed her throat raw. “What did I do wrong? There has to be something. There has to be--,”
The Administrator always had a grand goal, one that would make all the work, all of the hours laboring, murders, lies, espionage, double crossing, and triple crossing worth it. The ends could always justify the means. But there was no end in this contract. She would do the job over, and over, and over, and over again, and there was never any progress.
So why was she doing it?
She put her face in her hands.
Did she just like it?
A dust devil had formed on the horizon, and she did not move as it beelined straight for her. The corners of the contract fluttered before being ripped out of her fingers. The white sheet spun up into the whirling. Miss Pauling covered her eyes and ears as the sharp dirt and wind thundered past, more through than over her. The dirt stuck to every bare surface and worked its way into every seam in her clothes.
There wasn’t any Australium to be found here. Whatever the Administrator’s grand plan was, it didn’t matter in this place. So why was she following every order without question, fulfilling every contract the desert gave her?
She woke up in the sand again.
The clipboard sat innocuously nearby, face-down in a patch of crab grass.
Miss Pauling stared at it for several minutes. She stood, and stumbled over to it. The thirst-induced haze in her mind cleared, and with razor-sharp focus, she picked the wooden slab up and snapped it over her knee.
“How do you like that?!” she held the two pieces over her head as she screamed into the sky. “Huh? I broke your clipboard!”
There was no answer. She threw the pieces as hard as she could, and floored the pedal on her moped. They tore into the desert with a rooster tail of sand, her empty helmet bouncing away behind them.
Next was the crates. She ripped the lids off with such force that the wooden siding snapped. She loaded each weapon and emptied the clips into the cacti in rapid succession. She ignored the shadowy witnesses milling at her back. Metal casing grew into a pool of gold and copper around her as the cacti were blasted into pulp.
She dropped the empty weapon, now barely able to see the heat waves in the distance. It felt…good.
The witnesses had come to cluster nearby. One of them asked her a question, and she waved an exhausted arm in their direction.