Imperium

Origins: Justin

From here on out, I will be writing these origin stories along with the main storyline. I won't do all of them, just some because they are going to be important in understanding the characters.

* * * * * *

Being a college graduate is equal parts freeing and terrifying.

Justin has his degree hanging in his apartment where he can see it as soon as he walks in, Political Economy BA from Columbia, but when he’s walking from interview to interview it doesn’t help him much.

“Think of it this way,” one aggressively well-meaning potential employer tells him after he’s been turned down, “sure, you have an impressive degree from a top-rate school, but so do thousands of other young people. What makes you different?”

He doesn’t know. The longer he thinks about it the more he feels like there’s nothing that sets him apart from anyone else. He feels like a whitecap crest on a wave of hundreds of faceless graduates looking for a job.

. . . . . .

It’s weird being far from home and away from his friends. Everyone else he was close with moved back or moved away from school; he’s the only one who stayed to try his luck at finding a job in the big city. Allie’s the only one he knows, and Allie wasn’t even any kind of econ major. She’s leaving, anyway. She talks about it incessantly.

“I’m just tired of the weather and the people. And the city.”

“So you’re tired of everything,” Justin laughs into his coffee, and Allie shrugs.

“Yeah. I mean- well, yeah. Not you. You can come move to Panama City with me.”

“The sand in Panama is plastic.”

Allie ignores him, stirring her tea. They’re not super close, just friends through a friend, but this coffee date with Allie is the first time Justin has actually spoken in person to another human being besides those he’s trying to work for in a week. And soon even Allie will be gone, eyes set on the sunny coastline.

“How’s the job thing going?”

Justin quirks an eyebrow and tries to make his answer as nonchalant as possible.

“I’ll let you know when there is one.”

. . . . . .

The bar gets too crowded for him fairly quickly, and he’s not even drinking so he feels like a teenager at a party he shouldn’t have been invited to. It’s barely midnight when he leaves. Considering he got there at ten, he’s early, and the idea of unlocking his door before 12:30 makes him feel like a bad young adult so he takes the long way back.

It’s a pretty walk in the daytime, through a more business-oriented part of town, but in the dark it’s just deserted and creepy.

And then he hears it.

It’s a sort of gurgling, low and sudden. It stops just when he thinks he might be able to place it, and when it starts again Justin follows the noise, thinking it might be some kind of animal, or an overflowing manhole he could report and save someone a flooded work route.

When Justin sees him, the man writhing on the ground, his first instinct is to grab anything in case of an attack. It’s clear pretty quickly though that he’s not going to harm him, but he doesn’t seem drunk, either, so Justin wonders if he’s seizing and needs an ambulance. When the guy retches, he could swear that what comes out of his mouth- even in the streetlights- is the consistency of blood.

Justin looks up from him long enough to notice the man standing behind the stranger, and then his instincts take over and he ducks behind the corner of the building so that he can see them but remains unnoticed. This isn’t an ordinary homeless man versus man fight. Something here is horribly wrong; he can feel the hairs on the back of his neck stand up straight and his stomach flips and his palms start to itch.