Episode 3: The Honey Trap

An unexpected visitor offers Jonas a strange bargain. 

Guest Stars: Catie Miller as Sarah Goodman, Christian as Alex, Will as Wendel, Michael Spense as the Analyst

Laurence Simon reads the Episode 2 Recap

Excerpt:

February 16th, 2009

I'm exhausted, but I want to get this down on paper while it's all fresh in my mind.  Things are happening in Greenly now, things that make me want to leave more than ever.  Things I have no good explanation for, which sounds so silly considering the world I live in.  It all started this morning.  I woke up in a cold sweat to the banging of a insistent fist at my front door.  It always takes me a while to get out of bed.  I sleep on a cot in the back of the store, with as many quilts and blankets as the night requires.  The cot is hell on my back, but I tend to thrash when I'm having a nightmare and I've busted about four air mattresses.  Air mattresses are expensive, and I can't afford to break another.

I sleep in the store because it's safer than my parents home, and has fewer memories, good or bad.  It's best not to dwell on life as it was.  Waight Hardware has two entrances, with bars on the door and all the display windows covered in sturdy wooden planks.  There's a fringe benefit to this.  It keeps the deputies from sneaking in at night and robbing me blind.

I followed my normal routine, despite the noise.  I brushed my teeth, relieved myself into the hospital bedpan that's become my chamber pot, and checked my secret stockpile of batteries and non transmitting gadgets.  Throughout it all the banging continued, and I figured it was one of the deputies coming to "borrow" some ammunition for the watch towers.  They'd been shooting all night, and I figured they might run low, so I had a few boxes at the ready.  It's just good business.

I was expecting the deputies, but to my surprise it was Sarah Goodman banging on my door.   She looked irritated, las though we'd had an appointment and I was late for it.  I took extra time with the locks just to annoy her.  I know, it's juvinile but... well... fuck it.  She woke me up.  I opened the door a crack and she pushed her way right in, stomping past me and leaving the scent of lavender in her wake.  Things like this irk me.  The rest of us are huddled together waiting to die and she's wearing perfume.

As I asked her what the hell she wanted so early in the morning, she began to rifle through my displays, throwing things on the ground.  Anything that she wasn't interested in went into the "Restock after the tantrum pile."  Sarah Goodman is used to getting whatever she wants, and the citizens of Greenly know that if you deny her anything she's just going to send her boyfriend Willie Fetch and the rest of the deputies over for a "random" inspection.  One personal bottle of antibiotics, hell one anything that's "contraband" this week and you're liable to lose a quarter of your supplies or more.  The good stuff.  It turns out that though death is no longer inevitable, taxes are.  And if they find electronics, banishment.   I let her do her thing, and I restocked the shelves as she finished with them.

She spent the better part of an hour tearing my store apart I thawed some clean snow and enjoyed a terrible cup of home brewed coffee with a couple of saltines.  Breakfast of champions.  I cut the bitterness with some honey, that was frozen so solid I had to cut it out of the whimsical bear it came in with my knife.  I'm all out of sugar, along with most of the rest of the town.  She took nearly all of my ballpoint pens and about a dozen small nails, along with few pieces of cloth I'd torn into dish rags.  Nothing I couldn't replace.

When she went after my back room, though, I panicked.  I didn't want her to find the batteries, and she was getting into everything.  When I grabbed her arm she screamed "Don't fucking touch me!" and began to flail around like a wounded bird.  I started to become genuinely frightened.  Her eyes rolled back slightly and I swear to god she started snapping at me with her teeth.  I was afraid she was having some sort of psychotic episode.

Not knowing what else to do, I put my forearm into her neck and pinned her against a pillar.  The store is filled with a number of nasty things; axes, saws, and my father's lazy habit of just hammering rusty nails in the walls to serve as display hooks.  She could have very easily hurt or killed herself the way she was acting, and I'd have been blamed.  Her arms flailed, and her pretty painted fingernails became razor blades, slashing at my face and neck.  I've never been so thankful to be wearing a parka.

I don't know at what point I hit her, but I do know that I was dangerously close to becoming a cyclops when it happened.  I smacked her, open handed, and her jaw just dropped.  The sound was electric, out of place, like a thunderclap on a sunny day.  She froze, and touched her cheek.  I watched with not a small amount of concern as her wide blue eyes went cold.  She stared at me like a lizard, or a snake, and the hatred I saw was cold and deep and honest.  I held her steady for what felt like several minutes as she studied my face.

Then she was all weepy eyed and sobbing and whimpering "You HIT me!?"  I explained to her that she was, for lack of a better term, acting like a fucking psycopath and again asked her what she wanted.  Turns out it was my rubbing alcohol.  All of it.

"You got it from Jackson Tate for three cartons of Marlboros, and I can't find some anywhere else.  I want yours," she said, "Please Jonas?  I need it."