The Permutation

Homeostasis (Part 4) Michelle

Saturday, December 12th, 12:00 p.m.

It had been a hard sell, but Michelle had been able to spin it. A tunnel collapse at the last showing of the Nueva Vista Drive-In. There were holes galore in the story. Swiss cheese would've looked more solid. Why didn't anyone else know about the movie? How did Michelle know about the movie? Why were there so many dead people in town on the same night?

To all of these legitimate questions, Michelle professed ignorance. Christopher, Michelle, Ron, and even Blujh all somehow managed to keep the story straight while the catatonic Diana hadn't been able to add or subtract from her account.

Michelle knew the Burley Police Department and society as a whole had a hard time swallowing her story, and Officer Young still wanted to arrest her. Yet, even he knew he didn't have enough evidence to do anything about it.

When Michelle finally touched base with Marty, he was practically salivating at the whopping mackerel of a potential story. He received her resignation instead. He begged and pleaded like every man that's just realized they've lost all their power, revealing themselves to be the straw men they indeed are. Ron put in his two weeks a couple of seconds later and had taken to sleeping on the couch in Michelle's apartment, so had Blujh, but she didn't mind. He had a lost look on his eyes that she recognized from her own face in the mirror,

The two of them stayed up until the wee hours watching movies, never speaking of what had happened. On the nights where Michelle could actually get some sleep, the spirits still haunted her, but a member had joined their ranks.

Officer Perry Durant played a recurring role in her dreams, but not as the man she remembered. His piercing, blue eyes still managed to cut through her defenses even with the glaze of a dead man. Where his heart had been, a ragged hole with sharp protrusions of bones had taken its place. A leering, burnt face hovered over the menagerie of spirits laughing hysterically, and Michelle would wake with her fists clenched. If it was in anger or fear, she could never tell.

Michelle didn't know what came next for her in the "big picture," but she knew that she wouldn't be able to rest while that monster roamed free. She had no idea where he could have gone. The man was paralyzed and weak with exhaustion but had still managed to give her the slip. She understood why he had done it, primarily if the fat toad had known what she had planned for him. A court of law was too good for that piece of shit. The fact it would be considered murder didn't even enter into the equation.

What's one more body to the pile?

Since the incident, Michelle couldn't muster up the energy to do much of anything and hadn't felt the familiar flood of violet protein swirling in her bloodstream. Good riddance. That was a piece of her life that had best remain locked away.

Reporters weren't known for their hefty wages, and Michelle did not have a lot of money saved up for an extended period of unemployment. Ron had posted ads on Craigslist to capitalize on his photography skills, but Michelle did not feel like she had a comparable talent to offer. Besides, interaction with other people was apotheosis to her current mindset. Over that month, Michelle's once robust drive had been reduced to a withered, atrophied gland to the point where she couldn't even find the energy to care about losing something that had been integral to her character. However, she did find out what all the fuss was about in Grey's Anatomy.

One uneventful evening in a string of uneventful evenings, on her nightly Walmart ice cream run, she noticed something happening in an alleyway to knock her out of complacency. A man had taken it upon himself to accost an older woman. The straps of the woman's purse were entangled in her fingers, so the thug was not able to wrestle it loose, so her entire body was yanked towards him when he tried to pull it from her. In his left hand, he held a knife and brandished it at the woman. To Michelle, it appeared like the weapon was just for show, a prop to scare the woman into complacency. She had seen weapons held with the intent to kill,