Flintlocked, page 2
In the elevator, it was just the two of us, and as Jared nattered on about the “great little Thai place” he and Amy ate at last night, I soon became painfully aware of the smell coming from my shirt pocket.
The dead fish smell.
Jared noticed the smell, too, for it seemed like it had filled up the whole elevator in a matter of seconds. He wrinkled his nose and then turned to stare at me. “Zackary?” he said.
“Yeah?” I said, barely looking at him, trying to act casual as my face reddened.
“Were you eating pussy last night?”
“What? Jesus—”
Jared punched me in the arm. “You were, weren’t you? No sense denying it. I can smell it all over you. I mean, you could’ve taken a shower before coming to work today, but no matter.” He punched my arm again. “Zackary, you dirty dog, you. You finally getting some pussy then, huh? That’s great, buddy! Maybe now you can stop looking at Amy the way you do.”
“What? I don’t know what you’re talking about. Amy is my friend—”
“Oh, please,” Jared said. “Who do you think you’re kidding? I know you’re secretly obsessed with her. I mean, Amy told me as much before we even started going out.”
“Jesus… what?”
“Don’t look so embarrassed, buddy. I mean, I know how attractive Amy is. That ass? Those perky tits of hers? I don’t blame you for wanting to tap that. It must be hard, being so close to her and not being able to do anything. Face it, buddy, if she was interested in you, she would’ve opened her legs for you years ago. But hey, I’m glad to see you’re finally moving on. Though, next time, maybe take a shower before you come into work stinking like that. Or use some cologne. You can borrow some of mine if you like.”
“I have some in my bag,” I lied as the elevator doors opened. “I’ll just head to the men’s room now.”
“Try not to be long,” Jared said. “Your shift starts in—” he looked down at his watch, “three minutes. I don’t want to write you up for being late. Again.”
In the men’s room, I locked myself in one of the cubicles, sweat sheening my face as I panted like an over-anxious dog.
Jesus, I’m having a panic attack… My chest… Fuck… Fuck you, Jared… Amy… Oh, Christ, Amy… She really knows… She knows… Oh, shit. Oh, shit…
My trembling body cried out for nicotine, but I couldn’t smoke in the men’s room. The last person who smoked in here got fired, and I couldn’t afford to get fired.
Wiping the sweat from my face, I opened my jacket to inspect the shirt underneath, seeing the dark stain that had spread out from the pocket. Shit. What am I gonna do about this?
I pulled the pocket open to look at the mess inside, wincing when I saw Royston’s smushed body, one of his little eyes having grotesquely popped out of its socket, his guts all stuck to the material of my shirt. Taking a piece of toilet paper from the roll beside me, I reached into my shirt pocket and scooped out Royston’s pancaked body with the tissue paper, his blood immediately staining the tissue paper red.
I can’t hold on to this. Not now.
My eyes drifted to the toilet bowl next to me, which someone had pissed in and never flushed away.
I’m sorry, Royston, but I don’t have a choice.
Wrapping the tissue over Royston’s remains, I dropped the bundle into the toilet bowl and watched it land in the yellowed water.
Goodbye, Royston.
Shaking my head sadly, I flushed the toilet and watched the bloodstained tissue paper get gobbled up by the cascading water before being sucked away forever.
Chapter
Two
After scrubbing away most of the goo and blood from my shirt pocket with water, and then standing in front of the hand dryer to dry my shirt, I headed into the office. Or the Torture Pen, as I liked to call it. It was a large, low-ceilinged room filled with dozens of small booths, where people sat with headsets on as they doled out tech support to customers who were more often than not irate, not to mention stupid. Jared was already at his desk as I walked in, and he shook his head at me as he tapped his watch. “You’re almost five minutes late to your shift,” he said. “Where the hell were you?”
“Sorry,” I said. “I… got held up.”
“I’ll let you off this time, but only because you got some pussy last night—”
“Jared, Jesus—”
“Get to work. Customers are waiting, and we’ve got stats to think about. Go.”
Smirks on some of my co-workers’ faces made me drop my head as I made my way to my desk. Amy was sitting at the desk in front of mine, and the smile she gave me was as radiant as ever. Today, she was wearing a navy blue jacket over a white T-shirt with matching navy pants, looking as casually elegant as always, her long dark hair scraped back into a ponytail. “Hey,” she said, covering her mic so the customer on the phone couldn’t hear her. “See you later for lunch? I’ll buy.”
I did my best to smile, knowing that she knew how I really felt about her. Even though, thinking about it now, she probably always had. “Sure,” I said, barely looking at her.
“Are you okay, Zack?”
“I’m fine. It’s just… Royston died.” As good an excuse as any, and partially true.
“What? Oh no… Are you okay?”
“It was just a fish.”
Amy frowned, knowing I wouldn’t normally be so dismissive about the death of a beloved pet. “Are you sure you’re all right, Zack?”
Jared was now glaring over at me from his desk. “I’m fine. I’d better get to work. I’ll see you later.”
Sitting down at my desk, keeping my jacket on to hide the damp patch on my shirt, I went through the motions of putting on my headset and turning on my computer before taking my first call. “Tech support. How may I help you today?”
“Yeah, hello? This damn thing isn’t working properly.”
“Okay, sir, let’s see if we can help you with that…”
When lunchtime finally came, I went to meet up with Amy to go grab a bite from the deli down the street, but Jared had already beaten me to it.
“Sorry, buddy,” Jared said as he came and put his hand on Amy’s ass, which Amy brushed away with a girly laugh. “I got something planned for Amy today. You don’t mind, do you?”
I shook my head. “I was just going to grab a coffee, anyway. I’m not really hungry.”
Jared laughed as he punched my shoulder, making me grit my teeth as I smiled tightly. I just wanted to hit the guy back. Hard. “Must be all that pussy you had last night, huh? Filled you up, did it?”
“What?” Amy said in surprise as she looked at me. “You were with someone last night? Who?”
“Just some girl I met at a bar,” I said, running with it in the vain hope that I might somehow make Amy jealous.
“A bar?” she asked. “Zack, you never go to bars. You hate crowds.”
“Well, I did last night,” I said, my face flushing slightly. “I met this awesome girl, and we, like, screwed all night. It was great.”
“Zack… Jesus,” Amy said, making a face at me.
“A dark horse, this one,” Jared said. “I always knew it.”
“Yeah, a dark horse,” Amy said, staring at me.
“Come on, babe,” Jared said, grabbing Amy’s hand. “We should go. You should see where I’m taking you. You’re gonna love it.”
“Really?” Amy smiled, seeming to have forgotten about my strange behavior already. “I can’t wait.”
Jared winked at me before they left. “Enjoy your coffee, buddy.”
Yeah, fuck you, too, Jared.
When they left, I headed out by myself, staring straight ahead as I hurried outside so I could smoke a cigarette, puffing on it as I walked down the street to grab coffee and a sandwich from the deli Amy was supposed to accompany me to. I saw very little of Amy these days. We saw each other at work, but we rarely hung out anymore. Before Jared came on the scene, Amy and I hung out most nights, either at her place or mine, just playing video games or watching movies while we got high. Amy and I grew up together. She lived in the house next door to me until her parents moved to a different neighborhood when Amy was twelve. After that, Amy went her own way and I hardly ever saw her, save for exchanging the odd message online. It was only when she came to work at Mojo about three months after me that we reconnected again and started hanging out once more. Things were great between us, and we still had so much in common. But then Jared got transferred over from another branch and Amy hooked up with him, and now, I hardly ever saw her outside work because she was always with Jared, staying over at his place.
“Fucking Jared…” I mumbled to myself as I entered the packed deli and cued for ten minutes to get my coffee and sandwich, which I then carried back up the street to the bench opposite the Mojo building, sitting down with a sigh as a dark cloud settled over me.
Before eating my sandwich, I called the mechanic who was supposed to be changing the oil in my car. I left the car in three days ago and still hadn’t heard from the guy.
“What’s your name again?” the gruff sounding mechanic asked.
“Schade,” I told him. “Zackary Schade.”
“Schade? Weird-ass name. Oh, yeah, the Gremlin, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. It only needed an oil change.”
The mechanic laughed. “It needed more than that, buddy.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Well,” the mechanic said, in that way that mechanics do before they go on to justify the extortionate fee they're going to charge you, “the brake lines were shot, and the air filter needed replacing as well. Plus a couple other things. I’ll not bore you with the technical details.”
I shook my head. “But I didn’t ask you to do any of that.”
“Well, it’s done now, buddy. You want your car back, you gotta pay for the repairs. That’s all there is to it.”
I almost crushed my coffee cup. “This is… this is a joke… man. You can’t do this. How much are the repairs gonna cost me?”
After the mechanic told me the astronomical bill amount, he said, “Look, buddy, you want my advice? Get rid of this piece o’ shit. It’s a fuckin’ antique. Who the hell drives a Gremlin anymore, anyway?”
“I do.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you should think about upgrading.”
“Yeah, well, maybe I can’t afford to. Cars are expensive, you know.”
“Look, buddy, I don’t have time to talk shit with you on the phone all day. I got customers waiting. You can have your car back when you pay your bill.”
“But I didn’t ask you to do all that other stuff!”
“See ya, buddy.”
“Wait—he hung up on me… The asshole hung up on me! Fuck!”
Flopping back on the bench, I stared at the cracked sidewalk for a moment. There was no way I could afford to pay what the asshole mechanic was demanding.
“Fuck my life,” I said as I mechanically ate my sandwich.
After lunch, I walked around with a scowl thanks to the conversation I’d had with the mechanic, who was clearly trying to rip me off. The Gremlin, as old as it was, had been running fine before I left it in for a simple oil change. It didn’t need all that other stuff done to it. And oh my God, the bill! Where the hell did that guy get off charging that much? The bill came to more than the damn car was worth!
My blood continued to boil as I sat back down at my desk and roughly put my headset on. Taking my first call, I saw Jared and Amy come strolling into the room ten minutes late. But that didn’t matter, since Jared was the supervisor and he could do whatever the hell he wanted. Including blatantly kissing Amy in front of everyone! Even grabbing Amy’s ass, making her blush before she made her way to her desk. I couldn’t even look at her as she sat down. But I looked at Jared, and he winked at me, smiling like the cat who’d got the cream.
Asshole. I’m fucking sick of assholes!
Speaking of which, I had one on the line right now.
“I’m having trouble with this word processing program thingy,” the customer said, sounding like some fucking old guy who didn’t have a clue about anything, the type of guy who couldn’t even work out how to send a fucking email.
“What sort of trouble, sir?” I asked, my eyes boring into the back of Jared’s head as he sat at his desk.
“Well, I was just typing along, and all of a sudden, the words went away.”
I sighed. “Went away? What do you mean, they went away?”
“I mean, they disappeared.”
Yes, because words just fucking disappear, don’t they?
“What does your screen look like now?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
“It’s blank. Nothing shows up when I type.”
“Are you still in the program, or did you get out?”
“How do I tell?”
“Can you see the C prompt on the screen?”
“What’s a sea-prompt?”
God, shoot me now.
“Never mind. Can you move your cursor around the screen?”
“There isn’t any cursor. I told you, it won’t accept anything I type.”
Still staring at Jared, I watched him turn his head to smile sleazily at Amy, and my fist clenched as I planted it loudly on my desk. “Does your monitor have a power indicator?” I asked the old guy on the phone, further clenching my fist as I tried to keep myself from exploding.
“What the hell’s a monitor?”
“Are you serious, sir? It’s the thing with the screen on it that looks like a TV. Does it have a little light that tells you when it’s on?”
“I don’t know.”
Fucking look then!
“Well, then look at the back of the monitor and find where the power cord goes into it. Can you see that?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“Great. Now follow the cord to the plug, and tell me if it’s plugged into the wall.”
“Yes, it is.”
“When you were behind the monitor, did you notice that there were two cables plugged into the back of it, not just one?”
“No.”
“Well, there are,” I said, squirming in my seat now, not sure if I could even continue with this bullshit call. Not sure if I could continue with my bullshit life. “I need you to look back there again and find the other cable.”
“Okay, here it is.”
Wow, you actually did something right, you useless being.
“Follow it for me and tell me if it’s plugged securely into the back of your computer.”
“I can’t reach.”
“What? Well, can you see if it is?”
“No.”
Merciful fuck.
“Can you maybe put your knee on something and lean way over?”
“Oh, wait, it’s not because I don’t have the right angle—it’s because it’s dark.”
I swallowed hard. “Dark?”
“Yes—the office light is off, so the only light I have is coming in from the window here.”
Fuuuuuuck!
“Well, turn on the damn—” I had to stop for a second as the guy in the booth beside me gave me a concerned look. “Sir, can you please turn the office light on then?”
“I can’t.”
“Really? Why not?”
“Because there seems to be a power failure.”
A power failure. A fucking power failure!
More like a fucking brain failure, you stupid old fuck!
“Tell me, sir,” I said, my voice cold as ice now. “Do you still have the boxes and manuals and packing stuff your computer came in?”
“Well, yes, I keep them in the closet.”
“That’s good. Go get them and unplug your system and pack it up just like it was when you got it. Then take it back to the store you bought it from.”
“Really? Is it that bad?”
“Yes, I’m afraid it is.”
“Well, all right then, I suppose. What do I tell them?”
I jumped to my feet and screamed down the phone: “TELL THEM YOU’RE A STUPID OLD FUCK WHO’S TOO DUMB TO OWN A GODDAMN COMPUTER! YOU STUPID… FUCKING… IDIOT!!!”
Done screaming, I tore off my headset and lifted my leg to kick the computer monitor on my desk, having to kick it several times, almost losing my balance, before the thing finally smashed. Then I stood there staring at the wrecked monitor for a few seconds before realizing everyone in the room had stood up to stare at me. Including Amy, who seemed as shocked as everyone else at my uncharacteristic outburst.
Then Jared came walking over.
“What the hell is wrong with you, Schade?” he demanded. “You just destroyed valuable company equipment!”
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Fuck you, Jared.”
The whole room collectively gasped, and Jared’s face changed from that of a pissed off supervisor to someone who wanted to punch my lights out. “What did you just say to me?” he asked coldly.
I swallowed, aware that everyone in the room was looking at me. In the seconds it took me to reply, you could’ve heard a pin drop. “I said, fuck you, Jared.”
Somewhere in the room, someone snickered loudly, prompting Jared to step right up to me, his chest pushed out, arms by his sides like he was getting ready to hit me. And I wanted him to hit me. I wanted Jared to knock my fucking lights out, just so Amy could finally see what a true asshole the guy really was.
Jared may have been an asshole, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew the consequences of physically assaulting an employee. He’d end up getting fired, or worse. “I think you need to go see the manager,” he said.
“I’m sure Zack didn’t mean it,” Amy said. “His goldfish died this morning. He’s grieving.”
