The Springstorm Alpha

I sit on the hard wooden barstool as I sip my beer. It’s cheap and tastes like it, but I’m not drinking it for the flavor. I’m drinking it because I’ve had another long day at work and need some ethanol in my bloodstream. It’s only Friday night once a week, and I can’t let it go to waste.

The bar is busy, full of people doing the same thing as me for the same reasons. I don’t mind that at all. The more people who are around, the better I can disappear into the crowd. I like disappearing into the crowd. I like feeling unseen, inconsequential, like there’s nothing about me worth worrying too much about, so I might as well just relax.

Of course, while having some people around me can help me reach that feeling, it’s best of no one sits too close to me, which is why I’m a little annoyed when someone walks right up to the bar, and, despite the myriad seats available, takes the seat just next to mine.

The first thing I notice about him is his cologne. His scent is strong and pleasant, sweet and earthy, and above all, strangely soothing. It’s good. Like really, really good. Honestly, it may be the best thing I’ve ever smelled. I could ask him about it, but it’s probably too personal. Besides, whatever it is, I know I couldn’t afford a bottle.

The man himself is tan, tall, and muscular, with dark hair and eyes. When I say he’s muscular, I mean he looks like he either does labor for a living or follows a workout routine that’d be a job in its own right. He’s dressed casually, in unremarkable jeans and a white t-shirt which bears a logo I don’t recognize—a tree being struck by lightning—and is just a hair too tight so that it hugs and highlights his musculature.

I’ve been staring at him too long. He’s going to notice. Strike that, I think he has noticed. He’s looking back at me. He doesn’t look like he’s checking me out, but I’m not sure. I hope he is. I can only hope someone as far out of my league as he is would be interested in me.

“Hello,” he says to me.

“Hey,” I say, trying to force myself not to blush.

“How are you doing?” he asks.

“Fine,” I say. “Just got off a long day at work.” ‘Speaking of getting off...’ I think of adding, but don’t.

“I know that feeling,” he says. “By the way, forgive me for asking this, but do I know you from somewhere? I can’t place it, but you seem familiar somehow.”

That question gives me an excuse to study him further, something I am not going to waste. As I ogle him, I cast my mind back to where I might have seen him before. Nothing comes to mind. I wonder for a moment if he could be a past hook-up, but no, I’d have remembered hooking up with this guy. Boy howdy would I have remembered that. “I don’t think so,” I say. “Are you from around here?”

“No,” he says. “I’m here on vacation.”

“Have you been here before?”

“To St. Louis?”

“Yeah.”

“Not for any length of time.”

“I don’t think we could have crossed paths, then. I’ve never really been outside the city.”

“Are you sure?” he asks.

“Yeah, kinda, sorry,” I say.

“It’s okay,” he says. “You’re sure you’ve never been down to Springwater?”

Hearing that name startles me. Springwater? What does Springwater have to do with any of this? “Springwater?” I say. “Arkansas?”

“Yes,” he says. That’s the moment the bartender chooses to walk up to him and ask what he wants. A moment ago, I would have been paying attention to that, figuring that learning his taste in drinks could help me get in his pants later, but now, I can’t bring myself to listen to anything they’re saying. The name of that town, that awful town, floats in the air around me.

The first thing my mom ever taught me was to be afraid of that place, and what happens there. I was born there, according to her, but no one else could ever be allowed to learn that, and I should stay away from the town and everything to do with it. Springwater is dangerous, violence-ridden, and full of terrible secrets.

Statistics bear out what she said. The area around Springwater has one of the highest murder rates in the country, far, far higher than that of any town near its size. Every few months, there’s a news story about someone who tried to cut through it on their way to someplace else and didn’t make it out.

All of that is plenty of reason to be suspicious of it, but none of it is why my mother told me to be frightened of Springwater. What she said was far simpler. “The people in Springwater killed your father,” she told me, as I sat atop her knee as a child. “If anyone from Springwater finds out you were born there, they might want to kill you too. Never trust anyone from that town, and never, ever let any such person find out it’s where you’re from.”

Those words became a lurking terror that stalked me throughout my childhood. As a kid, I feared Springwater the way other children feared ghosts and boogeymen. Every noise that kept me up at night, every strange figure lurking in the corner of my eye, every stint of paranoia that kept me inside a single room because I was afraid of what I would find if I opened the door, in my young mind, all of it came from that awful town.

Some people would find my mother’s warning hard to believe, but I don’t. I know her terror of Springwater was as real and serious as mine. She once had a panic attack because she thought a car that had parked outside our apartment building was one she recognized from Springwater. She was running around the apartment, frantic, talking about picking up both of our lives and running away to some new hiding place where we could only hope we would not be found again.

Nothing she said was a joke, or hyperbole, or an exaggeration. The only reason we didn’t move away is that I, against her protests, insisted on going outside and looking at the vehicle’s license plate. Had the car truly been from Springwater, it would have belonged to Arkansas, but the plate was from here in Missouri, and even in that her panicked state, mom was able to recognize that that meant she had to be wrong about this being the car she remembered.

“You alright?” the stranger asks me.

I have to fight down the flinch that tries to come over me. I’ve been staring blankly into space, like a weirdo, for, G*d, a full minute at least. “Yeah,” I say, as normally as I can. “I’m fine. I just got lost in thought there for a moment. How are you?”

“No complaints,” he says.

“Good, good.” I let a moment pass. “So, you’re from Springwater?”

“I did say that a minute ago,” he says. “I’ve lived there my whole life.”

“Is Springwater like people say it is?” I ask. Maybe I shouldn’t still be talking to this person at all. Maybe I should be trying to shake off his attention, but divesting from this conversation could also seem strange, especially on the off chance, and I need to remind myself it is a very, very off chance, that he suspects something about me he’d be willing to kill me for.

My question doesn’t seem to be that strange to him, though, nor does he seem to be offended by it. “More or less,” he says. “Almost everything people say about it is true.”

“Oh wow,” I say.

“It wasn’t always so bad. At least that’s what my parents say. For as long as I’ve been around, though, it’s been a violent place, controlled almost entirely by a single company everyone there has to work for.”

“That does sound pretty horrible,” I say. At least he seems to realize that there’s something wrong with it. Surely that makes it a bit less likely that he’s part of what’s wrong with it, right? I shouldn’t assume too highly of him, though. That’s a risk, and my mom has always said that you don’t take risks with Springwater.

“Absolutely terrible,” he says. “I have the worst job. Heavy lifting for one of the factories there. Much of it, a machine should be doing, but it’s cheaper to make me work eighty hours a week.”

“Jesus. Is that even legal?”

“I doubt it,” he says, “but no one there cares.”

“Why don’t you leave?” I ask.

This does not seem to be an easy question for him. Now he gets his turn to stare into the distance for a moment. “It’s difficult,” he says. “Moving costs money that they make sure I don’t have. More than that, though, I know how this might sound, but it’s where my family is from. The company controls it, but there’s something in us that doesn’t want to fully cede it to them, you know?”

“I guess,” I say, which is a bald-faced lie. My mom seems to regard her exodus from Springwater as the best choice she ever made. It doesn’t make the first bit of sense to me to cling to a place like that out of, what, familial pride? “Don’t think I’d do the same, though.”

“Most people probably wouldn’t,” he says.

The bartender comes back by. My current drink is getting low, and I get another one from him. “So,” I say, “I was going to say something about having a terrible job too, but I don’t think I can compete with you on that front.”

“I suppose that’s for the best,” he says. “You can vent to me about it, though, if you like.”

“If you say so.” I sip my drink. “Well, my boss is the worst. You’d think being the shift manager at a metalworks factory wouldn’t be something you could power trip over, but he has dedicated his life to finding a way, and by G*d, he’s managed it.”

“I’ve known that type,” Nick says. “It’s amazing the transformation you can bring in someone by putting a single layer of subordinates below them.”

“Maybe I have less right to be surprised than I imagine,” I say. “Bosses gonna boss.”

“Indeed,” he says. “By the way, change of topic, but are you wearing some kind of cologne?”

“Me?” He’s asking me that?

“Yes.”

“I was thinking about asking you the same question.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah. It’s the first thing I noticed about you.”

“The very first thing?”

“Yeah. I’m not wearing anything, though.”

“Interesting,” he says.

“You sure it’s not your own you’re smelling, somehow?”

“I’m sure about that. I’m not wearing any.”

“Bullsh*t.”

“Not at all.”

“Huh.” I’m not sure I believe him but pressing it would just be awkward. I don’t want to make this guy mad. I kinda want to do the exact opposite, actually, though before I can do anything like that, I need to rule out the possibility that he wants to kill me. “So, you said you were here on vacation?”

“I get one single week off in a year. I’m even allowed to leave town to try to make the most of it. Bless the generosity of my betters.”

“I see,” I say. Is that what someone would say, if they’d been sent to hunt me down? Obviously, they wouldn’t admit the truth. Could it be a coincidence that someone from Springwater just happened to sit down next to me? Yes, it could, obviously. Of course it could. Of course it’s possible for someone from one particular town to just happen to sit next to me.

“What about you?” he asks. “You said you haven’t left this place, much. I take it you’re from here?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I was born right here in town, and I haven’t left the St. Louis met area since.”

“Never?” he asks.

I think for a moment. “No, never,” I say. “It’s a big city. I’ve never had the need to leave, or the money to go on vacation somewhere.”

“I see,” he says. “I barely do either. I’m lucky, among my friends, for being able to come this far.”

“Sounds rough.”

“It is. It is. Oh, off-topic again, but could I get your cell number?”

“What?” I ask. “Why?”

“Why do you think?”

Oh. He is interested in me. Like that.

“That’s, uh, bold of you,” I say.

“How so?” he asks.

“I mean, what if I’m straight?”

“You’re not.”

“Well, okay, no, but how do you know that?”

He chuckles. “Intuition,” he says.

Should I do it? My mom would say no. She would advise me to avoid someone from Springwater at all costs, to never take that risk. Given the stakes, it’s hard to disagree with her. I don’t want to be paranoid, but I can’t help but be suspect of the fact that someone from there just happened to walk up to me. It has to be something, right?

But it doesn’t. It doesn’t have to be anything more than a coincidence. It could be. It could not be. Not knowing what to make of this frustrates me immensely. I want to know what to make of it. I want to know if this heralds some larger, longer threat. In order to learn that I need to stay in contact with this guy. “Sure,” I say. We pull out our phones, and each give the other our number. “How long are you going to be in town?”

“A couple more days,” he says.

“Where are you staying?”

“The Candlelighter.” I know where that is. It’s not too far from my apartment. “Think you’ll stop by?”

“I don’t know,” I say. There is lust to fight down. This is, by far, the hottest guy ever to hit on me, so much so that I can’t help but wonder why. Like, he’s so far out of my league. I’m not in terrible shape, but I haven’t got half the muscles this guy does, and I’m way shorter than him too. He’s from Springwater, though. That fact needs to be at the forefront of my mind, even if his interest in me suggests I have a bit more game than I thought.

“Not tonight,” I say, “but maybe later this week. I’ll give you a call. I didn’t catch your name, by the way.”

“I’ve not given it yet. What’s yours?”

“Pfft. Why would I tell you that? I just met you. You could be a serial killer or something.”

“So could you.”

“Does this look like the face of a killer to you?”

“They say the real ones never do. In any case, if you’re not going to give me your name, I’m not going to give you mine.”

“That’s not fair at all.”

“It is exactly, precisely fair.”

“Hmf. Fine.”

“Don’t worry,” he says, “all you have to do to find out more about me is call.” He has the audacity to wink.