When Kathleen Graham got a job washing dishes at Tammy's Breakfast Diner, she fretted that someone someday might discover the truth of her identity. She appeared to be a typical college-aged girl working to pay her apartment rent, but she had learned how people who were different, who didn't fit in, were ostracized, and how the masses rebelled against that which they did not understand. She had seen on the news how the Muslims didn't like the Jews; read about how the government of a starving nation rejected food aid, because they feared adverse effects of genetically modified foods; and heard from the streets how “all of the Mexicans were taking the jobs.” If xenophobia seeded animosity in the minds of the world's citizens, then surely if anyone discovered the truth behind what Katy was, she would be thrown to the curb and beaten.
She wondered how far her search would take her to find a place that would accept her for who she was. But she thought she would search forever, because what place existed that would accept her as its own? Tammy's for the time being was a refuge until she could find that place, wherever it might be.
She stepped through the glass doors of her workplace at 7:54 in the morning, and her head flooded with worrisome thoughts that someone would point a finger at her and call her out for what she was. Somehow, someway, despite Katy exhibiting no physical signs or behavior different from a normal human, she thought someone with a sharp mind or a stroke of luck would obtain a clue. She tried to quell her swelling fears by calling them irrational, which she knew they were. She had been working at Tammy's for over two months now, and everybody treated her as a normal human being. But her rational thoughts did little to sooth her racing mind, so she recited the words her close friend—one of the few people to treat Katy as nothing but human—gave her when she helped Katy get her job: “Relax, you'll be find, Katy. If no one finds out, good. If they find out, great. Because then you'll find out who you should and shouldn't bother with.” Inspiring words, Katy thought, but they weren't the placebo she was looking for.
As she clocked in, the oldest server in the business said to her, “Good morning, Katy.”
“Good morning, Linda,” Katy mumbled to her. She watched Linda wobble as she carried a couple of glasses to her table. Despite her stiff wobble of a walk showing that Linda's best days were behind her, Katy suspected that the old girl had enough coal to burn to last her another ten or fifteen years. Most people around Linda's age—she was 64—planned their retirement, but she spoke of no such thing.
As Linda passed her, three glasses held with two hands, one glass slipped loose from her grip. “Oh no!”
Linda had barely finished her cry when Katy, her arm a blur, caught the glass in midair. Some of the water spilled over the edges, but it was otherwise presentable to the table.
As Katy set the glass on the counter for Linda to grab again, Linda said, “Damn, you're fast! I ain't never seen anyone catch something in midair like that before!” She laughed, grabbed the glass again, and finished her trip to her table with no further issues.
Katy tore the sheet of paper displaying her clock-in time the small printer spit at her and crumbled it up and threw it away on her way to the back of the house. A decent mound of dishes and containers piled on the dish room counter, and she cleared them out after setting the dishwasher up for the day. As she cleared the counter of dishes, several employees exchanged pleasantries with Katy. As Katy spoke briefly with each one, her anxiety diminished, and soon her mind wandered in a plethora of mundane directions as she performed her responsibilities. Just another normal day, she told herself when each fellow coworker displayed no suspicions towards her.
Katy lifted one of the clean stacks of plates and carried them to the kitchen at 8:32 before any of the cooks had the chance to holler for her. Katy was short, so she couldn't carry too high a stack without plates leaning against her face. Still, it was high enough that if enough female employee carried it, they'd hurry to their destination before their muscles gave out. Katy checked the alcove beneath the Wheel, the grill where grain products were cooked, to see if it needed plates and excused herself when a cook was in her way.
“I'm sorry,” said the cook, an auburn man named Andre in his 30s. Uniform dictated that employees who weren't servers were required to wear a hat, but he got away with a do-rag. “Damn, girl!” he said after inspecting Katy's small tower of plates. He grabbed the stack and transferred its weight to his torso while saying, “You may be a tiny little thing, but you're mighty, let me tell you.” As he set the stack in the alcove, he said with a grin, “Remind me to never pick a fight with you.” Katy made a small smile.
When she returned to the dish room to fetch another stack of plates, she found a server named Mateo—an American-born Hispanic—hiding out while scrolling down website on his phone. “You read news articles, right?”
“Sometimes,” Katy told him.
“Have you read about Prof. Oswalt's latest project?” he asked, referring to Prof. Janet Oswalt, a roboticist known for her talent with constructing and programming robots that was said to be ahead of the times.
“No.”
Mateo said. “She didn't give too many details, but she did say that she released a handful of androids a couple of months ago to certain areas of the city to patrol and protect them.”
“That's interesting,” Katy said, feinting her interest. Her feint, in reality, was but a mask to hide the paranoia that Matt had inadvertently wrought upon her. She turned to her counter of dirty dishes and busied herself with it to hide her melting mask and appear too preoccupied for further participation in the topic. She thought up responses for questions he might ask her, like what she thought of it. Or he might make a remark about it that was wrong, and Katy would, without thinking, correct it, revealing what she knew of the project—and that she was part of it.
She involved herself so much in her work that she didn't notice that Mateo had left until she looked over her shoulder over two minutes later. Her paranoia settled, but she now worried that Mateo would tell other people about it. And maybe, just maybe, they might start suspecting that Katy was a part of it. Somehow, someway, they would find out.
Katy continued with her work, using the constant surges of dirty plates and cups as a distraction from her automatic thoughts: Matt would mention the article to someone else, who would point out how Katy started working here around the time the project was announced, then they would bound her with rope and throw her to the curb, if they were that courteous. Gradually, though, she won her battle for peace of mind when no one else brought up the topic during the morning.
Some time later at 9:46, one of the other cooks walked into the dish room with a bag of instant mashed potatoes. Her name was Lucia, and she was tiny, shorter than Katy, and had a limited grasp on the English language, yet she knew enough to get by at her job. Her eyes wandered about at the towers of containers, the mess of utensils, and the hanging pots and pans and asked Katy slowly, “I need...” She spun her wrist as if stirring something. She said a word in Spanish and continued in English: “—for mixing.”
Katy pointed to the whisk hanging from a hook on a shelf hammered into the wall opposite the dishwasher.
Lucia upon seeing it said, “Oh, thank you.” She was one of many other Hispanics who worked at Tammy's, and beyond Matt and one other, none of them had a strong grasp at the English language. Katy had yet to learn Spanish herself, but she didn't mind the language barrier most of the time. Sharing a common language would have been convenient, though she noticed that none of the other employees minded the inconvenience.
Katy heard Linda grumbling and cursing after nearly breaking down one of the swinging doors at 10.28. She didn't understand enough of what Linda said to make out a coherent narrative, and Linda threw her plates across the counter and then left without a word of apology to Katy.
Irritation boiled within Katy, for she didn't approve of Linda's throwing the dishes down. Yet she found herself unable to confront her with any sort of words, even to ask what was the matter. The belly that spilled over the belt of the busgirl named Erin floated into view, and she set some glasses full of melting ice on the counter.
“What's the matter with Linda?” Katy asked Erin.
“A customer's being rude,” Erin said.
“Being rude how?”
Erin anchored her hands on the shelf where the racks for dirty cups were stored above the dish counter, bent down to look Katy in the eye, and said, “Saying all kind of stuff: complaining that their food took too long to come out, that it's too cold, that Linda's too slow and needs to retire.”
“Did they really?” News of customers complaining nonstop was nothing new, but this was the first time she heard customers say that an employee didn't deserve their job.
“That they did.”
“Isn't there something we could do?”
Erin shook her head and said, “No, the manager won't do anything.”
Katy once read on the back of the restaurant's menu in the fine print that Tammy's reserved the right to refuse service to a customer. She asked the manager that night if they had ever carried through with that threat, and he said they had. Now seemed like the perfect time to remind customers about the fine print. “Can't we refuse service to them? Or kick them out?”
“I'd love to be able to go up to them and lift and carry them out myself, but like I said, the manager won't do anything.” Erin let go of the shelf and straightened her back. “But hey, it's just another day on the job,” she said, and walked off.
As Erin walked away, Katy thought about how grateful she was that she was confined to the back of the house and not forced to mingle with the customers who may or may not use her as a mat. If some customers treated real human beings like dogs, how might they treat someone like Katy?
As the breakfast rush picked up, the traffic of dishes increased as well. Katy ended up behind the counter clearing plates and sending them through the machine without a chance for a break. At 11:12, a tall, hefty server named Christina with a Jersey accent asked Katy, “Would you like anything to drink, dear? Orange juice, apple juice?”
“No, thank you,” Katy said. “I'm fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I'm not thirsty.”
“Okay, hon, but if you want a drink, just ask.”
“Thank you,” Katy said, and Christina returned to the dining room. Though it didn't happen everyday Katy worked with her, Christina frequently asked Katy if she wanted something to drink. The day Katy met her was the first time she asked, and Katy had noticed since then that she asked the other employees the same; mostly the cooks, since they were chained to the kitchen by an onslaught of tickets that wouldn't cease until hungry customers stopped walking in.
Katy brought a fresh supply of plates to the cooks as the orders for the lunch hour piled in. While she set the plates in the alcove of a second grill, a server with a Southern accent asked Andre for permission to speak. When permitted, she pointed in the direction of the ticket printer above the grill and said to him, “For that ham and cheese sandwich, instead of ham, the customer wants sausage.”
“So they want the sausage on the sandwich?” Andre asked with his eyes on the ticket the printer sputtered out.
“That's right,” she said with a nod.
“All right, I got you,” Andre said, and hung the ticket up.
As Katy returned to the dish room, she found Christina setting some dirty dishes on the counter. She watched as Christina leapt from her own skin when deafening sounds resembling gunshots rang in the dining room. The plates on Christina's arm crashed onto the floor in an explosion of shattered glass and half-eaten food.
“What was that?!” she exclaimed as she looked out the door she had just come from. From behind the door, the dining room customers hollered and screamed as a couple of men bellowed at the top of their lungs.
Katy felt a rush of some kind that she hadn't experienced before. It cleared her head, energized her, and set her mind on one thing: the gunshots. With this focus and vigor, she sprinted past Christina and kicked the door open so violently that it nearly crashed back into her as she dashed through the frame.
Already she saw a server crouching behind a counter and eyeballing the dining room with frightened eyes. Katy followed her eyes and found a tan man strolling through the right wing of the dining room, a ragged sack in one hand and a pistol in the other. He had the smallest curls of hairs sprouting from his skull and wore a bandana that hid his mouth but not his demands for money and other valuable goods from the customers and employees. He pointed his pistol at Erin and demanded her phone and wallet.
Erin, whose hands were held in the air, was reaching for her pockets when Katy held up and directed her right palm at the robber's pistol. The center of her palm peeled away in a circular fashion, then a small metallic door slid open in an instant. Almost as fast, a small harpoon rocketed from Katy's palm and impaled itself on the barrel of the robber's gun, yanking it out of his hand and reeling it back to her as the attached rope buzzed from within her arm.
The robber's head whipped back and forth and he cursed before witnessing Katy crush his gun in her bare hand as if it were an empty soda can. “What the hell are you?!” he yelled as his now-empty hand reached into his pocket.
Katy tossed the useless weapon aside and pounced on him before he could withdraw whatever he was reaching for—likely a knife—and clenched his forearm hard enough that he cried out in pain, and then socked him in the face with a balled-up fist.
His head jerked backwards from the impact, and then fell down with the rest of his body on the divider splitting the booths. The customers cried out and jumped away from the man as he fell to the floor, limp. The customers screamed again when another gunshot echoed throughout the dining room.
“Put your hands up and step away from him!” yelled another robber at the other end of the right wing of the L-shaped dining room. This man of a darker complexion than his colleague hid his face with two bandanas: one across his mouth and the other over his head. He held a sack similar to the first robber's in one hand and in the other pointed a gun at Katy.
Katy released the unconscious robber's arm and held up her right palm, whose center was black from the hole.
The robber fired a bullet at Katy, stirring another wave of screams and tearing a hole through Katy's work uniform. A sound like a hoodlum striking a dumpster with a metallic bat screeched through the air. But Katy, despite detecting where the bullet had struck her body and tore a patch of her skin away, felt no pain from the impact as the bullet bounced on the ground.
Before the robber could fire another round, Katy loosened the harpoon housed in her arm at the end of the gun barrel. The startled robber dropped the gun as if it suddenly burned, and it seemed to float in midair for a split second before Katy pulled it back in, then contorted its metal figure beyond repair. As she destroyed the weapon and dropped it, she held up her other palm, and two small holes parallel to one another swelled into existence. From them, two prongs launched after the robber's chest and cast an electrical net over him. He hollered in pain as he fell to the ground, his body stiff.
The holes in Katy's palm closed—curtailing the cords of her stun gun—as the second robber hit the floor, then she started for the left wing to search for additional robbers. She had no need to search far, for a third robber with pale skin and a ski mask made himself present at the edge of the carpeting for the right wing of the dining room. He sent the crowd into a frenzy of gasps as he wrestled a young boy of Indian blood from a nearby table. His mother shouted something in her native tongue while tugging her son from the robber.
Because the robber's gun moved too much in the struggle, Katy couldn't get a clear shot of it with her harpoon. But because of the distraction, she accepted the opportunity to charge at the man and take him out before he had the chance to retaliate.
The robber beat the mother on her head with the butt of his gun, drew the boy into the grip of left arm, and held the barrel of his pistol to the boy's temple. “Don't move or I'll shoot him!”
Katy stopped where she was, almost four meters from the robber and his hostage. She couldn't see his face, but he could read the stern honesty in his eyes.
“Hands in the air where I can see them!” He frisked her numerous times with his eyes, obviously searching for the hand-held grappling device she was hiding on her frame.
Katy obliged his request with two hands above her head, her left palm open and her right palm closed.
The robber's eyes darted to and fro Katy's closed palm at a speed rivaling her harpoon or stun gun. “Open your hand!”
Katy, her eyes on the gun pointed at the sobbing boy's head the entire time, made the final adjustment of the direction her palm would face. She opened her palm and released the harpoon for the third time, snatching the robber's gun and sending him leaping backwards with astonishment. When the pistol was in her possession, Katy crushed it, threw it to the ground, and closed the remainder of the gap between her and the robber.
The robber, like the first, reached into his pocket for some other weapon or tool for defense but was too slow compared to Katy. She seized the forearm digging into his pocket with one hand and the wrist choking the boy with the other. She squeezed both limps with enough force to make the grown man beg for her to stop, then yanked his left arm to free the child.
Katy could feel the robber resisting her, trying his damndest to tug his arms free of her iron-grip, but his arms, as large and muscular as they might have been, had the strength of twigs when competing against Katy's strength.
“Let go of me, you—”
Katy wrenched the robber towards her and headbutted him in his chin, and the restaurant air was pierced with a loud crack. She let go of his wrist so that she could deliver to his cheek her fist. Another crack filled the air as the robber fell backwards and landed on the tiled portion of the floor dividing the dining room wings.
With the third robber down for the count and no more appearing to challenge Katy, she felt her rush being to withdraw. Her thought process wasn't so linear anymore, and she was more aware of her surroundings. She looked around the dining room and found the customers crying and gripping one another. One mother cradled her crying child in her arms, and the Indian mother stared up at her with water in her eyes as she rubbed her crying son's back. It was then Katy saw that many of the customers gave her the same stare—the same fearful stare. And it was then that she realized that their eyes were full of fear because of her.
They feared her, because she had exhibited her inhumane talents.
They feared her, because she could easily do to them what she had done to the robbers.
They feared her, because she wasn't human.
As Katy's rush finished draining and was replaced with desolation, she turned to her fellow coworkers for solace and found that they, too, gave her the same fearful gazes. Many of them were still in defensive poses and looked around as if asking, “Who's next, Katy? Who's next on your hit list?”
She knew this would happen. She knew that if her coworkers found out she wasn't human, they wouldn't treat her the same, but she didn't expect them to look at her like she was a monster. Perhaps this fate was worse: driving away others, because they feared for their lives, eventually clearing out cities and finding the whole world to be surprisingly empty. Katy foresaw that future now, and she couldn't bare the thought of it.
She tore out of the restaurant so fast that she didn't allow herself time to stop when she heard someone call after her. She simply burst through the glass doors and left her normal life behind.
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