Part 2 of 3
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Tonight, PI Mulligan Smith finds himself pondering a murder while reclining near a jovial man on the edge of death.
The Skinner Co. Network
FP320 - The Cost of Living: Part 2 of 3 - Mulligan Smith in The Best Medicine
Some days, gloomy, my hours are slumberless Dear is the shadows I live with I'm underless Little wife flowers will never awaken you Not where the brach ultra-sol is taking you Angels have no fire ever tuning you Or they may angry if I so don't join in you Welcome to FlashPulp, episode 320 This evening we present The Cost of Living, Part 2 Mulligan Smith in The Best Medicine This week's episodes are brought to you by Nutty Bites Wake up, go to work, work, come home, eat dinner Rot your brain out, go to bed, lather, rinse, repeat Are you tired of an old home drum life? Tired of things that just weigh you down and depress you? Wouldn't you rather just focus on things that are awesome? Tune in to Nutty Bites, find out what's awesome Nutty Bites, nimlas.org/blog FlashPulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age Three to ten minutes of fiction, brought to you Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings Tonight, P.I Mulligan Smith finds himself pondering a murder while reclining near a jovial man on the edge of death The Cost of Living, Part 2 Mulligan Smith in The Best Medicine Written by J.R.D. Skinner Art and narration by Opoponax and audio produced by Jessica May The building smelled of peppermints and medicine, and Smith couldn't wait to be free of its cinderblock walls Yet, he had a job to do Despite the murder that had taken place in the room, Mulligan was only on hand to look into possible negligence on the part of the nursing home The scene of the crime was the last stop on his self-conducted tour, a trek launched under the vaguely worded guise of his being a patient's son And the dead man's empty cot provided a convenient, if too firm, surface on which to briefly rest Besides, bedridden walt, the victim's roommate for some three years, offered outbursts of chuckling in a constant stream of twitching, but no complaints Smith had been informed by Julius Crow, a talkative walker-toater of the PI had encountered in the residence baron game area That the laughing invalid had not spoken a comprehensible word in the length of Crow's time wandering the converted mansions halls And that's six years longer than the doctors gave me, six years longer than I wanted, so you better believe it The stoop-shouldered man had told Mulligan before completing his sentence with a loud snort It was such a common conclusion that, by the end of their conversation, Smith assumed the man was used to providing the explosion as a method of punctuation for his heart of hearing friends When I first heard about old Gregor, Julius had continued, and I thought, "Heh, a deathly and old folks, huh?" "Yeah, that's a fucking surprise, if you mind my Frenchies" Mulligan had interpreted this "hirk" as meant to be conical, but said nothing Crow had happily chattered through the detective's silence Weird what makes the news, you know what I mean? For example, the staff here, especially the nurses, a good crowd Sort of an accident that they are, certainly not paid enough to be They are doctors in search back in the countries they'd come from They like to practice their English on me, and I get the impression deep creek man and his lack of visa requirements and flexible hours Means they can work and still slog their way through school to be recertified I feel for him in that respect, most already have more education than I ever did Now, it definitely ain't always perfect, but no batch of human beings ever is What I'm getting at though, is that sometimes, staff just disappear You talk to them on a Monday night and they say they'll see you in the morning, there's nothing Hmm, this grunted seemed closer to a mix of disgust and wonder The ordinary buggers ran here to write them off because they aren't paid enough for their taste And if someone doesn't show, they immediately say the missing person was probably busted by immigration The other employees don't want to raise a fuss and draw attention, and the barges, the folks would run the place It seemed to find it easier to hire new people than to track down the missing A dozen able bodies disappear and no one says boo But a single old thought has his face chewed off, and everyone starts running around with their hands in the air Mulligan had shrugged as he watched a slender Japanese woman tick up seating at the edge of a worn plastic bottom chair in the game room's corner She was drawing a wheelchair-bound crowd as nurses rolled in blank-eyed patients The snort was what had brought Smith back to business He asked, "You said things aren't always perfect" "What did you mean?" "Look out on the garden in the back, it's a story this place" "Beautiful bit of work once, probably been here as long as the land's been settled" "And now it's just a ride of thorns and weeds" "One of the poor buggers who had to jump fences and run from dogs to get here refused to go in there" "And why should they?" "The owners bought this place, filled it, then forgot about it" "Same situation goes for the inside" "Everyone does their best, but even with the barges, endless pool of suckers, there's never enough staff" "Especially after lights out" "If they think you're a mobile, they don't swing by to check on you very often" "That's exactly what happened with Gregor" "Walt's laughing aside, they were both basically vegetables" "The Russian didn't do much but drooling shit in the last three years I knew them" "So the night crew probably didn't think to poke in on them" "Then some crazy bugger snuck in there and got to gnawing on Gregor's head" "Well, Walt just chuckled to himself in the dock" "Could he even feel it?" "We'll never know, I guess" "He'll have passed time for him to go though" "For all of us, really" His ears had remained focused, but Smith's gaze had again fallen on the woman in the far corner Her practice fingers had extracted a frail looking flute from the depths of the white baby sling she carried across her shoulder And Mulligan had found himself wondering if the child on the slide might rouse when her practice fingers and taut lips began to project a tune into the room It did not *chuckles* After contemplative nose clearing from crow, Smith returned to the task at hand "The people aside, you talk like you'd rather not be here" he said "Six years too many? Pass time to go?" "It doesn't sound like you're terribly enthusiastic about the facilities" "Ah, hell, it's not that" "Take Miss Yamato over there" "I know half the people in here at their mouths still work and think she's Chinese and not Japanese" "And it don't matter how many times I tell them otherwise" "Imagine all these bastards up and around, bitching little leagles of ruin in the country" "And video games are turning todays youth into godless killing machines" "Death has its purpose, even if it's not a pleasant one" "Maybe someday we'll be in space or down low non-brains or whatever" "But for now we're built to make room for new ideas" "But being forced to let go of the old ones" "Even if we don't want to" Besides *chuckles* "What else does a gal like Walt have to hope for, but a visit from the Reaper" Now, as Mulligan sat not 5 feet from the confying man, Mulligan realized that perhaps Walt had been looking forward to more than Julius might imagine Smith swung his legs beyond the bed's edge and zipped his hoodie With his shadow falling over the snickers, lumpy sheets and his hand on the taser in his pocket he asked "You just have a good evening, or have you been running a calm these last few years?" There was no answer, but the rolling of Walt's shoulders slowed and his blue eyes focused on his visitor's face Mulligan nodded, convinced that the man was no danger to anyone who wasn't a mobile *chuckles* So, one day you found the symptoms on the downswing, and you got the munchies? I did the guys investigating this or much used to dealing with the health problems associated with cannibalism But I know, Kuru, when I see it You may not serve a lot of jail time, and I doubt you'll ever be linked to whichever corpse originally gave you the laughing disease But we still make a nice medical oddity for the doctors to prod Well, until it finally kills you Would the lack of a diagnosis be enough to prove negligence on the part of the barters? The PI didn't know, but the discovery might be enough to earn him his paycheck As he departed, Smith was chased into the hall by a burst of involuntary laughter And out of the building, by the melancholy notes of Misty Maddow's woodwind He reached for his phone *music* Flashpulp is presented by Flashpulp.com and is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial 3.0 Unported License Text and audio commentaries can be sent to comments@flashpulp.com But be aware that they may appear in a future flashcast We'd also like to thank the Free Sound Project, found at freesound.org For a full listing of effects used during the show, as well as credits for the users who provided them, check this episode's notes at flashpulp.com And thanks to you for listening If you enjoyed the show, please tell your friends *music*