Weekly Drabble #367: God Loves a Fool (Patreon)

This week's prompt is "promoted to the level of your incompetence" (the good old Peter Principle) from Jeffrey Kessler, bringing us back to this setting. A little less on the monsters this time and some good old fashioned human plotting, with an earnest by none-too-bright young woman at the center of it. Enjoy!

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God loves a fool, but so does the devil:

Jack didn’t know why, but someone wanted poor Stacey Agrain dead. It wasn’t as obvious as death threats in the mail, near-misses with vehicles or gunshots through a window. In fact, many people would have called it paranoia, but Jack could read between the lines. He’d worked for the Care, Containment and Confinement Committee for nearly twenty years. He was familiar with all the facility’s ‘guests’. He knew which inhabitants were the most dangerous and which you could work with. That information was covered in all the briefings, training jobs and assigned studies for every keeper, but there was a difference between knowing a thing and experiencing it firsthand.

Especially if you were as dumb as a bag of rocks. Which, putting it politely, Stacey absolutely was. People, Jack included, would have said she was too dumb to live in any but humanity’s current era. Jack still found it vaguely amazing that the girl made it into adulthood without taking herself out of the gene pool. She might be living proof that it was better to be lucky than smart.

Okay, that wasn’t entirely fair to his new trainee. Stacey wasn’t dumb dumb in the manner of a drooling idiot. In fact, she’d actually surprised him with the depth of her knowledge in several fields. And no, she wasn’t neurodivergent. She was just stupid. The best way he’d heard it explained was from one of his other underlings, Carlos. Carlos played Dungeons and Dragons. He’d tried to get Jack into it, but it wasn’t for Jack. He wanted to take his mind off work on his downtime and the game was too close to reality for him.

Nonetheless, it had given Carlos the perfect insight into Stacey. He’d said “Intelligence 14, Wisdom 0.” That summed it up in a way Jack hadn’t considered. The poor girl was book smart, but her critical thinking abilities had probably ended the day she discovered that fire was hot... and it probably took her longer than usual to grasp that concept.

That was why Jack knew someone was trying to kill the sweet little idiot. She’d somehow passed all her tests for clearance to the Care, Containment and Confinement facility and for her first rotation, she’d been assigned to Jorge. Making it through the tests was suspicious enough – they couldn’t all be solved like college exams – but getting that posting had set off alarm bells in Jack’s head. If he hadn’t met Stacey, he wouldn’t have thought anything of it. But he had and he’d quickly come to understand the concept ‘airhead’ in a way he never had before. Jorge would chew her up and spit her out – literally.

Jorge wasn’t exactly the brightest light bulb under the mountain, but he wasn’t as simple-minded as he let on. He had an animal cunning that had served him well in the wild, even tricking several of his past keepers into making fatal mistakes. Stacey was precisely dumb enough to fall for his ‘sad, bullied child’ routine. Sooner or later, she’d get close enough to his cage and that would be that. “Jorge likes pretty girls,” Jack had heard him say. “They are fun to play with and then they go crunch crunch crunch.”

Jack had spoken with Personnel. Bart didn’t know how Stacey got that assignment. He’d wanted to wash her out, but apparently she’d scored high that he couldn’t. He’d assigned her to some rote secretarial duties where, to borrow another phrase from Carlos, her high Int would help and her low Wis stat wouldn’t get in the way. Instead, she’d been put on watch duty. Bart assumed it was just a mix-up. That didn’t mean he wasn’t concerned; those kinds of mix-ups couldn’t be allowed here at CCC. He was investigating the fumbled roster and planning to tear a strip off whomever was responsible, but he didn’t think it was a malicious act.

Jack didn’t agree with Bart’s assessment there. You had to have a sixth sense to survive at this job and ever since he’d plucked an unknowing waif from the jaws of death (rather, being squeezed through bars too small for a human body to fit) his had been telling him that this wasn’t just a screw-up; someone had wanted to put that girl in harm’s way. He just didn’t know who or why.

The best he could come up with was that someone wanted to get at her father through her; Davin Agrain sat on the continuing board of the Committee. He had a lot of pull, but enemies? Enemies who were willing to fudge tests, change duty rosters and put an earnest but stupid girl in a position to be ripped limb from limb? The keeper couldn’t see that. It was too extreme. Maybe Bart was right. Maybe this was just a fuck-up and everyone was lucky that Jack had caught it. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe that tingling sensation on the back of his neck whenever he thought about the situation was right.

Until he knew for certain, he was going to keep Stacey close at hand where he could keep an eye on her. In a hollow mountain filled with monsters, people had to look out for each other. He just wasn’t sure how long he could. Sooner or later, even the luckiest soul’s luck would run out... and even faster if someone had it in for you.

Stacey was waiting for him outside the womens’ locker rooms, earnest excitement on her freckled face. She’d gotten here early. “Hair,” he said, pointing to the blonde locks hanging down her back.

She blushed and quickly tied it up, hiding it under her cap. “Sorry.”

“Hmm,” he grunted. The girl had a good attitude, but that wouldn’t help her when she was sliding down the gullet of one of the facility’s residents. “Come on. Let’s punch in and see how your first day goes.”