Volume I - Episode 106 Where: Melbourne, Australia When: 18 days after E-Day, 10:34 am Jason was fifteen when he started working at the bakery. Most teenage boys preferred to be sound asleep in their bed at 3am, but Jason spent it lifting heavy bags of flour and baking wholemeal lunch rolls. And he loved almost every minute of it. For one thing, the job kept him away from his abusive, alcoholic grandfather, who enjoyed nothing more than coming home from the pub in the small hours of the morning and pulling his grandson out of bed for a beating. He would have bashed Jason's sisters too if they had been just a little older. But Fiona was only 7, and 13-year-old Tiffany lived with their aunt in Sydney. The other thing Jason loved about the bakery was the smell. There was nothing in the world quite like the smell of freshly-baked bread; and as the months went by, he discovered it was a smell he never grew tired of. There were nights when he would wake up drooling, just thinking about wolfing down one of Mrs Nicholas's freshly-baked custard scrolls for breakfast. Maggie Nicholas owned the bakery. She was an enormous, heavyset woman who clearly enjoyed eating her products as much as she enjoyed selling them. The kids at school mercilessly called her Jabba the Baker. But she was good enough to work for, and she seemed to have taken a shining to Jason from the moment they met. She was always kind and patient with him, and was never short on encouraging words. Occasionally he would even catch her staring at him while he hauled heavy bags of sugar out of the store room. He had always been a thin, weedy boy, but working at the bakery had developed his upper body in ways he had never imagined. He was turning into quite a good-looking young man. But then, shortly after his sixteenth birthday, life at the bakery had all gone bad. He had arrived at work one hot summer morning to find the bakery stinking of fish. Only...that wasn't quite right. It smelled of the ocean. More specifically, it smelled like the handful of times his dad had taken him fishing when he was a kid, many years before he had begun to suffer beatings at the hands of his cruel and alcoholic grandfather. The fishing days were good times. Happy times. The smell made him feel strangely comfortable and at ease. He walked through the bakery, sniffing loudly, trying to find the source of the strange, out-of-place smell. Instead, he found Mrs Nicholas in the store room, waiting for him. She was wearing a huge smile...and nothing else. Jason turned to leave, but instead found himself putting his arms around the enormous woman's neck and kissing her thick, greasy lips. When she began to fumble with the clasp of his jeans, he tried to tell her to stop, but instead pushed her hands deep inside the waistband of his underwear. The moan this elicited from his boss's lips made him nauseous, but instead he found himself kissing her deeper. He never worked at the bakery again after that night. It was the worst, most humiliating experience of his life. He tried never to think of it, and for the most part he was successful at that...until now. Rushbury Community Gardens smelled like the ocean. Jason stared at Nikki, his eyes narrowing. And as he handed her his pistol, he summoned his one last ounce of self-control. He opened his mouth and told her what she was. "You're a witch." First published: Saturday, 8 September 2012