Featured image by Bruno /Germany from Pixabay
“When you pulled me back to Earth in the restaurant I told you I was thinking about the condoms” I more asked than stated.
“Yeah, so what?”
“You all went through training. Various courses for various lengths of time. Did you have to take a course with the cleaners immediately after your kill?”
“Wasn’t one of the better courses” offered Giant, “but, yes, I did.” The other two nodded in agreement.
“There were no training courses when I started” I said to their shocked faces as we walked. “Five years into my employment here I had a five day course in hand to hand followed up many months later by three or so days of marksman training and specialty firearms. Don’t ask what that term means, I’m not going to explain it because it most likely doesn’t apply anymore.”
“Many of the students don’t make it to becoming condoms because they fail that class. They also don’t realize the curriculum is terminal. Some of them become the captives for the other student’s first kill and trip through that course” I continued. “Henry is a master chef. He’s carved more things up than any of us would dare to believe. I’m told the cleaners walked out five minutes into his prep for body disposal. They said there was nothing they could teach him.”
“Son-of-a…” started Giant, but I cut him off. “I told you, Henry is not a natural man. I don’t mean that in any alphabet soup kind of gender biased or slurring way. Henry is an incredibly twisted kind of straight. Nope, I’m not going to define it. Not trying to be an ass. Honestly I don’t think I could define it. What I can tell you is a story I heard several years ago about Henry.”
“He was sent on a job in some foreign country. Relative of the leader, son or nephew, the tale varies, was an influential member of some child sex slave ring. The leader knew only about the drugs and the regular slave parts of the business and turned a blind eye to them, allowing for the darker industry to develop. Henry was sent to the kitchen to prepare some diplomatic banquet. The red meat portion of that meal was not beef. Many thought it was yak. Some thought it was kangaroo. Others believed it to be some kind of wild game. To this day I do not know if they figured it out.”
They all made the appropriate retching sounds of disgust and I let them finish before continuing. “That is why I never eat red meat around Henry. I typically only eat cod around him because he dosed me with that on our first night. I do not know what the other nineteen poisons are. Well, not all of them. Nor do I know what the other half is for some of what I do know. What I do know and you guys rib me about is that I can never risk eating Mexican food of any kind again because something typically found in one or more of the dishes is the other half of the poison which makes cod taste so good. I also know that a chemical compound originally worked on to make things like nicotine patches absorb through the skin better is rumored to work on foil and certain types of plastic packaging like potato chip bags. It allows the poison to penetrate, then the package can be cleaned leaving no trace from the outside.”
At this point I paused to let all of that sink in. We walked another block in silence before Giant said, almost under his breath, like he was trying to etch it in his mind, “don’t eat anything around Henry.”
[…] <Previous Part Next Part> […]