Wasteland Lullaby #9: Operators
The Parlor
Wasteland stories Porter Gage tells the Sole Survivor, somewhere between taking one park and the next.
Standalone stories. Read in any order.
Morning at the Fizztop Grille. Gage had a shard of mirror propped against an empty cola crate and a straight razor in his hand, working it up the side of his scalp in short, careful strokes. The Sole Survivor leaned on the bar with a bottle of Quantum and watched.
"Didn't take you for a man who grooms."
"Hair grows, boss."
"You've had that same shirt on for days, but the mohawk gets kept up."
"Shirt don't fall in my eye." He tilted his head and scraped another line. "I've only got the one. Can't spare it."
She watched him crane his neck, angling the shard toward the back of his skull. "You know that'd take somebody else about thirty seconds."
"Ain't a soul in this park I'd let stand behind me holdin' a razor."
He said it the way he'd say the water was running low, and went back to scraping blind.
"The Operators seem to manage. Every one of them barbered like they've got a funeral to attend." She sipped. "That's the one I've never figured. I can picture you recruiting the Pack. I can even picture Nisha's door. I can't picture you pitching to people in pressed suits."
"Caps," Gage said. "That crew runs on one fuel and everybody knows it. Findin' 'em was the easy part. I'd been hearin' about 'em for a year. Caravans hit so clean the survivors counted their own stock twice, figured they'd miscounted. Suppressed guns, no bodies unless bodies paid. Polite robbery."
"So you walked in with numbers."
"Walked in with a head full of 'em." He wiped the razor on his thigh. "Their place threw me first. Candles on the tables. Tablecloths. Napkins, boss. Cloth ones, folded. Only napkins left in the whole damn wasteland, most likely, and they're sittin' in a raider den."
"Did you use one?"
"Didn't touch a thing. Mags is sittin' there like I had an appointment. Knew my name. Knew Colter's crew. I came to sell her Nuka-World." He set the razor down on the bar. "Turns out she'd already appraised it."
"What did she ask?"
"That's the part that stuck. First question out of her mouth was what happens to their cut the day the arrangement stops payin'. She asked how the deal ends before she asked how it starts."
"And the brother?"
"Said one word to me the whole meeting. 'Pleasure.' Their chem cook was runnin' somethin' in the back that smelled like boiled hubflower and burnt wire, and nobody offered me a chair till the numbers were on the table."
"But she signed."
"Fastest deal I ever closed. She heard the terms, said the park was a fool's trap and she didn't plan on bein' the fool, named her percentage, done. I got every single thing I walked in for." He looked at the mirror shard. "Didn't sleep worth a damn that week after. Kept turnin' it over, tryin' to figure what I'd sold her without knowin' it."
"You got everything. What's there to lose sleep over?"
"A deal that clean means she counted somethin' I didn't."
She studied him. "You don't like her."
"Like ain't in it. She smiled the whole way through. She smiles at everybody. I've watched her smile at Mason the way a man smiles at a guard dog, and at Nisha like bad weather she's waitin' out. Me, she smiled at like a caravan hand who'd delivered her freight on time." He picked the razor back up. "And the whole meetin', she never once lost track of where my hands were. Smilin', keepin' the talk easy, and still clockin' every move I made. Word is her and William walked out of some top-floor family in Diamond City and took the silverware with 'em. I crawled up from the bottom rung, so maybe that's all she sees. Don't matter. The smile's the receipt."
"So those are your three. Mason growls, Nisha sharpens knives, and Mags folds napkins."
"Mason's dangerous when he's hungry. Nisha, when she's bored." He found his angle in the mirror shard again. "Mags I keep an eye on when business is good."
The Sole Survivor finished her Quantum and pushed off the bar.
"Remind me to check the ledgers, then. If the take ever starts looking too good."
Gage grunted something that might have been approval. He went back to work, tilting his head, bringing the razor up toward the spot behind his ear he’d never once been able to see. He found it by feel.
She left him to it. Behind her, on the way out, the razor went on scraping. Somewhere down the hallway it occurred to her that he would have kept at that spot till morning before he asked, and she laughed once, under her breath, at nothing.
