Flash Fiction - Quartermaster's Rules (The Whale)

A return to The Whale! I've been pulling together some short stories as I ease back into the strange world of The Whale. This is my first attempt at widening out the lore and the background of the place. Rough and ready, but I wanted to have something to post this week. I'm excited to share more with you in the coming weeks.

“I’ve come for my pipe.”
“No such thing as your pipe, son.”
The arrival slammed both hands palm down on the table in front of Archibald Gray. The whole thing shook and a selection of trinkets rolled to the floor. Gray ignored the angry young man and instead watched the last one, a small hoop made of ivory, wobble back and forward in front of him.
Just before stopped movement, he snapped it away and pocketed it. He returned his gaze to the arrival, whose anger had been tempered somewhat by the old man’s lack of reaction to his aggression.
“It belonged to my Grandfather,” the arrival said. Gray didn’t know his name. He tried not to learn their names until they’d been on The Whale for a year. It was simply a prioritisation mechanism. No point remembering all the names, especially given the high death rate in the first few months.
“You didn’t have a pipe on you when you were found,” Gray replied.
“Show me.”
Gray shrugged and twisted on his stool.
“Name?” he said.
“Naz Amin.”
Gray ran his eyes over a set of wooden trays. They were arranged in order of arrival, so this bloke must be…
He snatched a tray down and put it on the table. Then he forgot the man’s name. The arrival rooted through the tray for a few seconds, then leant back and folded his arms.
“It was in my pocket.”
“When you were last conscious it was in your pocket.” Gray shrugged. “But who knows what happened between you passing out and The Whale taking you?”
“You mean until I woke up here.”
“That too.”
“Last thing I remember was the car going into the ditch.”
“And do you think it’s likely that things stayed exactly where they were?”
“I suppose not. But this…”
The arrival reached down and picked up a lighter.
With startling reflexes, Gray grabbed the younger man’s wrist.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“This was my Father’s,” the arrival said.
“And now it belongs to us all.”
“If I can’t have the pipe, let me have this.”
“Can’t do that.”
Gray wasn’t a tall man, a wide man, or a strong man. He was, however, the master of the store. That meant that he controlled what came out of the store. He didn’t need to be wide, tall or strong.
He had the air of a man who would quite happily starve someone for a few days for a misplaced glance. His daughter often found that her potential suitors started going pale themselves after a week or two of dating her.
“Everyone thinks they had more when they arrived than they actually do,” Gray lied. “But things move around, the Earth shifts” (so he’d been told) “and things go missing. The important thing is that we bring it all here, so I can record it and decide who needs it the most. That’s how we become better. That's how we survive.”
He liked that speech. He’d written it down somewhere.
“If I find out you’ve been lying to me,” the arrival said, “it won’t be pretty.”
Still holding his wrist, Gray hobbled around the desk and began to lead the man to the door of his little hut. The arrival glanced down at the old man’s ivory leg, carved to replaced a lost leg. Gray found it helped when he stole things to remind people that they at least had more limbs than him.
Although he’d rather still have all his legs.
“I wish I could help,” Gray said, shrugging.
“How did it happen?”
“The leg?”
Gray nearly told him the truth - that he’d gotten in debt to the wrong type of alien and in return he’d been kidnapped, chopped and eaten. That the alien had been threatening him and his daughter with becoming another meal if he didn’t supply as many Earth curiosities as possible. That his original leg was down-payment on a lifetime of servitude.
Of course, he didn’t say this.
“Mining accident,” he said instead.
The arrival nodded.
“Dangerous place, this.”
Gray shrugged again. “No place for sentimentality. Not if we’re going to survive.”
“I suppose not.” The arrival stopped. “If you find it, you’ll tell me, right?”
“Of course,” Gray lied.
“I know things are different here, but - if I can hold on to one bit of home.”
“I understand.”
With a gentle twist, Gray pushed the arrival out of the door. Then, securing the lock, he picked the pipe out of the desk drawer and held it up to the light. It was a beautiful thing. It was something from a planet he’d never visited, a world he’d never been part of. But he felt the tug of it, the emotion buried in an old, varnished piece of wood.
He shook his head and found a box for it.
It would probably buy him another few weeks.