Django Durango

“There’s been a change of plans,” Haworth said as he straightened his loose notes. “We’re meeting Miss Byng today, not the General.”

Verloc frowned. “Is he sending her instead as a message?” he asked.

“I don’t believe so. I think he’s just giving her more responsibility over the Executive Committee’s liaison with the labs so he can pull back on his,” Haworth surmised. “All us old guard are making our plans, aren’t we?” he said, regarding Verloc fondly. “Miss Byng is obviously his. She lives in the Village so she’s better positioned to keep more regular tabs on us than he is.”

“We might have already solved the supply problem if we didn’t have to take time out to give them progress reports so often,” Verloc complained.

“They’re under just as much pressure to deliver as we are,” Haworth said as he took a small flask from his jacket pocket. “We’re all on the same deadline.” Verloc eyed the flask reproachfully, but Haworth didn’t notice as he was too busy unscrewing the cap. He took a quick swig and screwed the cap back on, wincing at the bitterness before a look of inordinate delight sprung up on his face.

Just then, the intercom on his desk beeped and a woman’s voice said through the crackling static, “Miss Byng is here for your two o’clock appointment.”

Haworth stuffed the flask back into his pocket, pressed the button on the intercom, and said, “Right on time! Send her in, Dottie.”

“Make sure to smile,” he whispered hurriedly before the door opened. Verloc forced his own face into a too wide grin for the occasion.

Read on…

September 4th, 1964

“Did you poison me?” Gemma asked. She hadn’t bothered getting out of bed for Verloc this time, feeling entirely too miserable to even bother, and instead just lolled her head to the right to stare in his direction.

“No,” Verloc said. He leaned against the wall next to the door, looking bored like he was merely biding his time in here. He hadn’t asked her any questions about how she was feeling, which Gemma found strange given the purpose of his visit, but not out of his character. “Blackberry withdrawal is difficult and unpleasant. Didn’t Sally tell you that?” He didn’t ask in a spiteful tone; he sounded as if he thought that wasn’t like her not to have been thorough in her warnings.

“She did, but she didn’t say death would be preferable.” The headache that started yesterday had only grown sharper and more insistent, and today it had been joined by the vague, itchy heat of an impending fever on her back. That morning’s dose of Coconut had added a generalized feeling of anxiety that she couldn’t put a cause to and was now working to ignore. “You have to have Crash here, don’t you? Wouldn’t it make more sense to test your Joy formula without the Blackberry interfering with it?”

Read on…

“Hargreaves! Did you finish replacing the signage?” Richard Arkwright called down the spiral staircase leading to Arkwright Labs’ House of Tomorrow exhibit.

“Just this last one to go, sir!” Timmy Hargreaves answered from the bottom of the stairs where he was pulling last year’s poster off its display stand. Visit 1983 in the Wellington Wells House of the Future!, it read. He had another identical poster from further down the lane rolled up on the ground at his feet. The one he was peeling off the display now ripped at the corner, but they were just going to throw them away.

Every year on the second of January, the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research renovated the House of the Future exhibit. That is, they updated the signage and Uncle Jack’s guided tour video to be one year further into the future. Arkwright had just finished replacing the sign underneath the television screen in the foyer and now he was ready to test the updated tour video the Broadcasting Corporation had sent over before the Christmas holidays. A fresh tour video was filmed every year to detail all the “new” technologies the DSIR were planning to bring to Wellington Wells.

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September 3rd, 1964

“Oh look. It’s an eagle, here to eat my liver.” Haworth watched Verloc enter his cell from the far corner where he leaned against the wall. He had been spying on Plantagenet while he waited. “Just smashing.”

One side of Verloc’s mouth hitched up at Haworth’s lazy quip. “You’ve told that one before, Prometheus.”

“Yes, well, if you’re going to gas me with your half-baked Joy formula every day, you’ll have to forgive the occasional repeat,” Haworth said, pushing himself off the wall and closing the distance to keep Verloc from venturing too far in. He liked to keep Verloc in the space by the door so as to make him feel both claustrophobic and unwelcome.

“I brought the pills on the off chance that you wanted to make this easier,” Verloc said. He tried to sound nonchalant about it, but Haworth knew he was hoping to be taken up on the offer. That he pulled a jar of medicated healing balm out of his pocket instead gave away that he knew he wouldn’t be.

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“I heard you were looking for me, Chief,” Gemma said, leaning in Margaret Oliphant’s office doorway.

“Yes, come in and shut the door,” Margaret said. She was taking one of her cat portraits down from the wall behind its corresponding statuette. Gemma shut the door behind her and perched herself on the edge of Margaret’s desk, crossing one leg over the other. Margaret glanced disapprovingly at Gemma’s cheeky choice of seat, but said nothing about it. Instead, she got to the point.

“We have to retract your article about the Parade being under quarantine,” Margaret said. She lifted her grey cat painting up off the wall and walked it behind her desk to lean it up against a column, far from its usual place.

“Another retraction?” Gemma complained. She crossed her arms and grumped. “It’s a wonder I get anything to print at all.”

“I try, but we’ve got the Executive Committee and the Department of Archives going through everything we print with a fine-tooth comb. It’s… unwise to contest whatever “additional context” they wish to provide.”

Gemma sighed. “I’m not blaming you, but if everything I write gets retracted… It’s a good thing no one remembers what they read anymore or I’d have no credibility left at all.”

“Speaking of credibility,” Margaret broached as she pulled out her chair and sat down, “I’ve been meaning to ask how you even got into the Parade without a Letter of Transit.”

Read on…