Tim Lebbon - The Cabin in the Woods

Never did understand the whole kid thing, Gary Sitterson thought. Mess your house up, drain your resources, and make you grow prematurely old.

He held his mug beneath the coffee dispenser, setting on “strong.” He’d have used “nuclear” strength if it existed; it was going to be a long day, and he was tired. Beside him Steve Hadley sighed, and Sitterson smiled to himself.

Besides, it’s obvious for all to see: women are mad.

It had been brought to his attention more than once that this attitude made his job far easier.

“It’s hormonal,” Hadley said, continuing the rant which, if anything, was more of an expression of bemusement. “I mean, I don’t usually fall back on, you know, ‘It’s women’s issues’…”

“But child-proofed how?” Sitterson asked. Hadley, married and still childless, had been bemoaning the fact that his wife was preparing their home for the arrival of a child not yet conceived, though one for which they had been practicing for some time. “Gates and stuff?” “No, no, dude,” Hadley said. Bemusement was turning rapidly into exasperation. “She bought gates, they’re stacked up in the hallway. She did the drawers! We’re not even sure this fertility thing is gonna work and she screwed all these little jobbies where you can’t open the drawers.”

“At all?” Sitterson asked, holding his coffee mug halfway to his mouth. What the fuck? There was mad, and there was plain crazy-batshit. He’d met Hadley’s wife briefly and, patently insane though she was, he’d not thought she was any higher on the scale than most women. But screwing all the kitchen drawers closed? What, to stop Hadley getting at the food so he’d go to bed and screw her instead?

“They open, like, an inch,” Hadley said, illustrating with thumb and forefinger and shaking his head. His own coffee cup had overflowed once already, but he pressed the serve button again. Dude was definitely somewhere else today; that wasn’t good. “Then you gotta dig your fingers in and fiddle with this plastic thing, a catch, lock, like a sorta…” He shook his head and grabbed his cup, spilling half of it. “It’s a nightmare!”

“Well, I guess sooner or later—”

“Later!” Hadley spat. He shoved past Sitterson and started pumping dollar coins into the vending machine. Chocolate bars and bags of chips tumbled, and Sitterson thought, He really can’t get into his kitchen cabinets. “What I mean is—”

“She did the upper cabinets as well, man! Kid won’t be able to reach those ’til he’s thirty! Assuming, you know: kid. Hell, she can’t even reach them—has to stand on a stool or call for me!” He looked into some depressing distance for a few seconds, then mused, “Wonder how the hell she got up there to drill.”

“She chosen the kid’s college yet?”

Hadley paused in tearing open a chip bag, staring at Sitterson as if, for a moment, he was going to rip open his own friend’s throat.

“This isn’t a fucking joke, Gary,” he said.

“I know,” Sitterson said, mock-stern. But he couldn’t keep a straight face, and as his lips twitched and his eyes started watering with restrained mirth, Hadley shoved the food into his pockets and hefted the bundle of files under one arm. Coffee cup gripped in the other hand—still spilling, though almost empty by now—he pushed past Sitterson and left the room.

Still laughing, trying to calm himself, Sitterson picked up the white cooler box at his feet and went after him.

“Hold up!” he called. Hadley had started along the plain concrete corridor, starkly painted white walls echoing his offended footsteps. “Hey, Steve.” Hadley paused and glanced back, a defeated smile softening his own features.

“Shithead,” he said.

“Yeah, I know.” Sitterson took a swig of coffee. “It’s a talisman. It’s an offering.” “Don’t even—!” He shook his head. “Man, you have women’s issues.”

“Please,” Sitterson said softly, feeling a little sad for his friend now. He knew how long Steve and his wife had been trying, and maybe he should try to empathize a little more. “You of all people—”

“Me of no people. It’s a jinx ! Guarantees we won’t get pregnant, and it takes me twenty minutes to get a fucking beer.”

“Look out,” Sitterson whispered, spying movement along the corridor past Hadley. “Here comes trouble.” Trouble in this case was a tall, severe-looking woman in a white lab coat. Six feet tall even without the two-inch heels she wore, Wendy Lin was one of the few women ever to make Sitterson feel uncomfortable.

No wonder he’d always wanted to get into her panties.

She might have been beautiful if she wasn’t so tense, and she mightn’t have been so tense if she didn’t choose to tie her hair back so tightly. Sometimes Sitterson thought that Lin must employ the aid of some arcane preening device to pull her hair back so far each morning. And just to make him more firmly convinced of his generalizations, she was quite patently mad.

“Stockholm went south,” Lin said. No greeting, no preamble. And with news like that, it was hardly a surprise.

“Seriously?” Sitterson gasped. “I thought they were looking good.”

“What cracked?” Hadley asked. “I haven’t seen the footage,” she replied. “Word’s just going around.” Sitterson felt a chill at the news, but it was mostly one of excitement. With Stockholm gone, it made them that much more important.

“That scenario’s never been stable,” Hadley said. “You can’t trust… what do you call people from Stockholm?”

“Stockerholders?” Sitterson grinned at Lin, knowing how she hated flippancy. She was as serious as her hairdo, and probably twice as tight.

“Ha!” Hadley coughed, making a gun with his fingers and shooting Sitterson for such a bad, sharp, quick joke.

“That means there’s just Japan,” Lin said, pointedly ignoring them both. “Japan and us.”

“Not the first time it’s come down to that,” Hadley said. He chewed on a Snickers to cover his nervousness, but Sitterson could see the way his friend’s eyes were shifting.

He’s thinking about his kid that’s not yet conceived, he thought. And who can blame him?

“Japan has a perfect record,” Sitterson said, stating what they all knew anyway. And he admitted to himself that, yeah, okay, he felt a little nervous at the news as well. Even well-oiled machines fell victim to gremlins on occasion.

“And we’re number two, so we try harder,” Hadley said. He hated being beaten by anyone, but especially the Japs. If Sitterson was sexist—something he was aware of, and comfortable with—then Hadley’s main fault was his casual racism. Sitterson had never brought him up on it, because it was just too uncomfortable. Too damn serious. And the only way he got by was by ignoring anything serious unless he had no choice but to confront it.

“It’s cutting it close,” Lin said.

The three of them started walking, passing beneath steadily glaring fluorescents and moving along the featureless corridor. The floor was power-floated concrete sealed against dust, the walls were unadorned and unbroken, and the ceiling hid a network of pipes and wires above its suspended panels. There wasn’t a single nod to aesthetics. Identical doors were spaced at equal distances along one side, and behind the other wall was something else. Something that didn’t have doors.