Zero day code, p.9
Zero Day Code, page 9
part #1 of End of Days Series
“Sure. I’m thinking of killing someone right now.”
Rick was sweating by the end of the session, although more from the heat of the day than any exertion. He taught the three boys a basic hip throw and a leg sweep. Showed them how to fall to a hard surface without breaking any bones or winding themselves. By the end of the half hour, they were all sweating. High overhead a passenger jet traced a white contrail across the vast blue bowl of cloudless sky.
“Okay, that’s it,” Mel shouted, clapping her hands. “Bow to your partners and take a minute to stretch everything.”
There was a lot of giggling and some playful pushing and shoving as the teenagers sketched out formal bows to end the class. Very few of them did even a moment’s stretching. Rick took the time to perform a proper warm down routine and insisted that all of his knuckleheads do the same. They protested, but it was a pro forma objection. Thirty minutes of training with the former special forces non-com had convinced them he probably knew something about what he was doing.
“Thanks for that,” Mel said as the main part of the class dispersed towards the clubhouse and a bus ride back to school. She bowed to him and after a moment of uncertainty he returned the gesture, thinking that it was probably second nature to her.
“It was a pretty good workout,” Rick said. “Gonna need a nap now, I reckon.”
With a whistle he summoned Nomi from under the shade tree where she’d been dutifully waiting for him, panting and occasionally wagging her tail. She trotted over and sat obediently a few feet away without being asked.
The knuckleheads all thanked him for his time and called him ‘sir’ before charging off after their classmates. He did not correct them. Mel watched them go with something like bemusement.
“Hey! You three, stop right there,” Rick shouted after the retreating figures. It had an effect like the crack of an overseer’s whip. They all jolted to a complete halt and turned around nervously.
“Ms Baker was your teacher for today. Not me. You should thank her.”
The three boys looked at each other nervously, uncertain of what to do. One of them finally said, “Thanks Miss,” and the other two followed suit. Then they surprised Rick, and Mel for that matter, by awkwardly bowing to her. She smiled and returned the bow.
“You boys hurry back to the bus, now,” she said, setting them free. They charged away.
“You’re pretty good at that,” Mel said. “You could do it for a living.”
“What? Teach judo?”
She shook her head, “No, just teach. You have a presence. Those guys,” she jerked a thumb back over her shoulder at the retreating knuckleheads, “they could really do with some presence in the classroom.”
Rick scoffed, “Reckon I’d rather be back in Fallujah.”
“Fair enough,” Mel shrugged. “But seriously, thanks. If you’ll let me, I’d like to buy you dinner to say thank-you properly.”
There it was. The moment that’d been coming for five or six weeks now. The moment that probably would have come a lot sooner if he didn’t feel as though negotiating even the simplest social transaction was something like finding his way through a minefield with a bayonet. He was smiling, but the smile was frozen on his face, and he didn’t know how to unfreeze it, and…
“You should probably just say yes,” Mel said. Her expression was not unreadable. Rick could see in her eyes an awareness of his sudden apprehension, and the surprising lack of fucks to give on her part.
“Yes, God yes,” he blurted out, “Oh shit,” he added, horrified at his ham-fisted response. “I didn’t mean…”
“How about I pick you up at six thirty tonight,” Mel said, touching him lightly on the arm. “You look like a steak man. I’ll book us a table at Morty’s. That way, if it’s a disaster, you can bring a doggy bag home for Nomi.”
Rick’s head with swimming with how fast this was going. For a second it felt exactly like the moment when she had unbalanced him and flipped him through the air to land on his ass in front of her class.
But it wasn’t.
They had been sidling up to each other for weeks now. He could’ve asked her out on a date at any time in the last month and she probably would have said yes. But he hadn’t, and with each chance that he let slip by it became easier to let the next one go, too.
“Okay,” he said, finding his voice at last. He swallowed. “1830 hours. I’ll lock it in.”
“Good,” Mel said. “It’ll be good.”
And it was and it wasn’t.
Having agreed to a date – he was pretty sure it was a date – Rick tried very hard not to think about, well, the date. He completed his rounds of the golf course, gathering up fourteen lost balls which he deposited into a basket at the clubhouse. He patched up half a dozen or so divots on the fairways, and made note of a torn net on one of the tennis courts. It would need to be replaced. As much as he was looking forward to meeting Mel for dinner, his anticipation threatened to tip over into anxiety if he gave more than a minute’s thought to it.
Instead he put in earphones and listened to some music. A Foo Fighters playlist of their slower tracks. He threw a stick for Nomi to chase and enjoyed the sun on his back and generally did his best not to think about something which he’d been thinking about for weeks.
He had first met Melissa when he was shopping for groceries at the Harris Teeter in Darnestown. Rick preferred to do his groceries online, but the site was down and he was getting short on rations. If he didn’t resupply, he’d be tucking into a big bowl of Nomi’s venison kibble for dinner.
Like most Labradors, Nomi was hugely sociable. Training constrained that natural friendliness, but her tail set to wagging as soon as she heard Rick grab the car keys from the bowl on his kitchen bench. She rode up front in the cabin. She would’ve been fine in the tray, but he preferred to have her next to him.
He played Joe Bonamassa’s Redemption album on the drive down to the market and they sang along together. Nomi’s love of a good blues howl was one of the things Rick most loved about her. The other was that he could trust her.
Being a service dog, Nomi was allowed inside Harris Teeter while your average mutt had to suffer the indignity of being tied to a bench outside. She trotted obediently alongside him, up and down the aisles as he filled his shopping bags; one full of fruit and vegetables and the other with a heavy pork shoulder he would slow cook down to spicy brisket.
The one place she was not allowed was inside the big meat locker at the back of the store. Highly trained service dog or no, state law would not countenance the idea.
“Stay,” Rick commanded, as he ducked into the cold room for his meat. He knew that he could be gone for half an hour and she would not bark, or fret, or leave her assigned post. Only if somebody tried to take her would there be any barking. Some growling and snapping too, if they didn’t get the message. He was inside for less than a minute, quickly gathering the large cut of pork shoulder he needed, before emerging to find a young woman hunkered down and deep in conversation with his dog.
Nomi was soaking up the attention and mugging for a selfie with her new friend.
“Help you, Ma’am?” Rick asked.
She didn’t look even a little bit embarrassed to be caught out loving it up with somebody else’s dog. The woman stood up and fairly beamed at him, unfolding an impressively athletic-looking body. She was dressed in black lycra and a Nike Run Club tee shirt.
“No, I’m doing just fine,” she said, giving Nomi one more head rub. “She is a beautiful dog. How old?”
A little taken aback, Rick drew a blank.
“I, er… I don’t…”
“You don’t know how old your dog is?” the woman asked, in an unfamiliar accent. It could have been English or maybe Australian.
“I do,” he said, feeling himself on the defensive for no good reason, it’s just…”
But Mel had lost interest in him, the delinquent dog owner, and she was leaning back down and kissing, yes actually kissing Nomi between the eyes. And Nomi was lapping it up, almost as if she knew how unsettled Rick was by the whole exchange.
“She’s three,” he said suddenly.
“Sorry?”
“She’s three years old,” he said, feeling it was important that he say it.
The woman seemed impressed.
“Still a puppy then, really. She is a very good girl. You’ve trained her well.”
“I didn’t train her, not entirely anyway,” he said. “She’s my therapy dog.”
The young woman appeared to accept this as a given.
“Were you a soldier?” she asked, but she went on speaking before Rick could answer, or try to evade her question, which he sometimes did when people asked him that. “My brother was a Marine. A Royal Marine,” she said.
English then.
“He went to Iraq three times. He’s all right. Said he loved it, actually. But some of the blokes he went over with, they did it tough, coming home. A couple of them had therapy dogs. I’m Melissa by the way. Melissa Baker. But just call me Mel.”
She held out her hand and smiled at him as if confident that there could be nothing he would want more in the world that to meet her and to just call her Mel. The hell of it was, she was right.
Maybe it was Nomi. If Nomi liked her, she had to be okay, and it was pretty obvious from the lolling tongue and big dopey lovestruck eyes that Nomi was all in on this just-call-me-Mel situation.
Rick shook her hand. Her grip was strong.
He hadn’t fallen for her, not then. He hadn’t really expected to see her again. It was just a pleasant meeting with a young woman who didn’t seem to care about his scars or his history or the darkness that he sometimes felt as a physical presence gathered around him. But a week later she’d appeared at the golf course, leading a bunch of high school kids through a self-defence class, and that was when he’d learned that she was an ex-cop. An ex-Bobby, she called herself, two years out of London and the police force and ‘well shut of all that rubbish and palaver.’ She was a qualified personal trainer now, studying in Baltimore for a high school teaching diploma, and paying her way through the degree by doing these classes up and down I-95, anywhere from DC to Philly.
He hadn’t offered to help with her classes; she’d insisted.
They got to know each other as she tossed him around like a bag of old laundry, and he had let himself be tossed.
It was maybe the third or fourth week of her picking him up and slamming him down and landing on his chest to pin his arms and mimic beating his face to a bloodied pulp, that Rick Boreham had realised that he really, really liked this woman.
He hadn’t come out of his cabin for two days after that.
And now, here he was, showered and shaved and pacing the very short distance between his living room and his kitchen, wondering whether he should shower again and change his clothes because he was pacing so much, and he was so nervous, that he probably, certainly, almost surely reeked of flop sweat. Nomi was curled up on her old sheepskin rug, tracking his path up and down, back and forth, tilting her head and staring at him as though he had gone mad from a poisoned tick bite.
“This is your fault,” he said to her, and she dropped her head to her paws, suitably chastened. “I should have another shower,” he said again. He had muttered the same thing to himself three times in the last ten minutes. This time, however, he actually started to head towards the bathroom, just before he heard tires on the gravel driveway and squinted as powerful headlights beamed in through the windows of his cabin.
It was her.
Rick cursed under his breath. There was no time for a shower. He would just have to go, reeking of stale sweat and desperation. That’s if Mel even agreed to go on with the date now. She’d probably gag and run back to her vehicle as soon as…
He heard boot heels clocking on the wooden steps, and three firm knocks on the front door. Keys jingled outside.
It was like the first crack of a rifle shot when the enemy opened contact. None of his uncertainty, his fears and doubts disappeared. But he had stuff to do now, so he did it.
A deep breath. Four strides to the door. Turn the handle, and…
“Hey Mel. You look great.”
Just like a normal person.
She smiled and said hello and walked in without being asked and then Nomi was bounding over to her, barking and wagging, and Rick took another deep breath and let it go and thought that maybe he could roll through this and maybe it would be all right.
10
System Crash
The world ended and the lights didn’t even flicker.
Of course it took a while before Jonas Murdoch, or anyone, realised that everything they knew had come to an end. Hundreds, hell no, thousands of years of western civilisation had real momentum to it. It’d keep rolling for a while, even after the engines choked out.
The sirens warbling and echoing throughout the giant warehouse cut through his confrontation with Travis Tamoreau like a heavy meat cleaver chopping down between them. The assistant manager, who’d looking genuinely terrified when Murdoch’s anger got away from him, now looked frightened and confused by whatever was happening on his laptop screen. His delicate, manicured fingers danced over the keyboard, but to no effect. Jonas couldn’t see what was happening on screen, but the little twink’s expression, the panicky bird-like flutter of his eyes, implied nothing good.
Jonas grinned.
He was done here. He didn’t need this shit anymore. He had another life waiting for him. Only one thing left for him to sort out. Who’d set him up? He couldn’t believe—he didn’t want to believe—it was one of the Dutch hotties he’d helped out last week. The answer was sitting on the cheap laminated surface of Tamoreau’s desk, in the thin, buff-coloured personnel folder.
Jonas casually leaned forward and picked it up. Tamoreau was so intent on stabbing his fingers uselessly at the keyboard that it took him a moment to realise Jonas had taken the file and was reading it. The violation of the master-servant relationship, of the inherent and accepted power imbalance, was so brazen that it finally pulled him out of his feedback loop with the malfunctioning computer. He almost leapt up out of his chair to grab back the papers.
“Hey! That’s confidential, you can’t…”
Jonas shoved him back down. It was only a light push, but Tamoreau was only a little guy. Jonas was not. And he was angry. The assistant manager fairly flew through the air, tripping over his office chair and crashing to the floor. Reaching for a handhold, he pulled a landline phone and a cup full of pens down on top of himself. Jonas ignored his outraged squeal. He was already speed-reading the reports in the personnel file with a strange mix of elation and resentment.
He was right.
The hotties hadn’t complained about him at all. As if they would. He’d been nothing but a gent to them. No, this was a fucking Yolanda special. She’d complained to Omar that Jonas would not take direction from her without attitude and pushback. That much was true. He’d give her that. But only because pretty much all of her directions were bullshit and sometimes even stupidly dangerous. It’d been Yolande, after all, who’d ordered the Dutchies to haul those industrial-sized sous vide cookers all the way over to dispatch, where the only clear stowage space that day was on a shelf twenty feet off the fucking ground. What were they gonna do? Deadlift the fucking things and levitate up there?
So yeah, Jonas hadn’t just cleaned up that mess. He’d let Omar know all about Yolanda’s stupidity. But he hadn’t sexually harassed her. That was insane. She was an ugly bitch with an ass so big and buttcrack hairy it needed its own crew of fire watchers when the dry summer months came on.
He tossed the report back on the desk. Tamoreau was trying to untangle himself from his chair and the phone line, but he was shaking so much he kept tripping over his own spindly limbs. Jonas ignored him. He threw the report back on to the desk and walked out. His reflection in the office window looked calm, but he knew himself. This was the anaesthetic numbness that so often preceded one of his eruptions. He stalked past Cindy on the front desk, who looked like she was quietly freaking out. He ignored her and she half-waved, half-smiled at him, before going back to her own screens, trying to make things happen that obviously didn’t want to happen.
Emerging from the offices and back onto the warehouse floor, Jonas was by the heat of the day and the blaring alarms. The fulfilment centre sounded as though it had fallen into chaos, but as his boots rang on the metal staircase, Jonas could see the opposite was true. Sirens howled and red and yellow warning lights flashed, but nothing moved. Most of the workers on the shop floor stood very still, craning their heads back and forth, looking for the source of the alarm. A few managers hurried back and forth, mostly running towards each other, taking excitedly for a few moments, and running off in different directions again. But Jonas could see what was wrong, at least in aggregate.
The entire operation has seized up.
System crash, he thought.
He’d only ever been through one before, but it had looked just like this.
He shrugged and kept walking down the stairs. Apart from the sirens, his boot heels clanging on the metal steps were the only sound he could hear in the vast cavern of Amazon’s frozen warehouse. He reached the floor and almost walked straight for the exit. He doubted they’d even pay him for this shift, and he knew he was done in Seattle anyway. He was the Centurion now, for better or worse.
He’d only given Tamoreau a playground push, but that little bitch was sure to file charges and Jonas already had the assault conviction in Florida. He was also about to add to his criminal record here in Washington state. His limbs felt loose as he walked back to his station. The buzzer in his electronic bracelet went off, helpfully reminding him that he was already overdue. He tore off the tracker and threw it away. A couple of co-workers saw him and called out, asking if he knew what was happening. He forced himself to smile and shrug, and he kept going.
He found Omar and Yolanda deep in conversation, agitated and so preoccupied with the disruption to operations that they didn’t notice him until he was on them.
Rick was sweating by the end of the session, although more from the heat of the day than any exertion. He taught the three boys a basic hip throw and a leg sweep. Showed them how to fall to a hard surface without breaking any bones or winding themselves. By the end of the half hour, they were all sweating. High overhead a passenger jet traced a white contrail across the vast blue bowl of cloudless sky.
“Okay, that’s it,” Mel shouted, clapping her hands. “Bow to your partners and take a minute to stretch everything.”
There was a lot of giggling and some playful pushing and shoving as the teenagers sketched out formal bows to end the class. Very few of them did even a moment’s stretching. Rick took the time to perform a proper warm down routine and insisted that all of his knuckleheads do the same. They protested, but it was a pro forma objection. Thirty minutes of training with the former special forces non-com had convinced them he probably knew something about what he was doing.
“Thanks for that,” Mel said as the main part of the class dispersed towards the clubhouse and a bus ride back to school. She bowed to him and after a moment of uncertainty he returned the gesture, thinking that it was probably second nature to her.
“It was a pretty good workout,” Rick said. “Gonna need a nap now, I reckon.”
With a whistle he summoned Nomi from under the shade tree where she’d been dutifully waiting for him, panting and occasionally wagging her tail. She trotted over and sat obediently a few feet away without being asked.
The knuckleheads all thanked him for his time and called him ‘sir’ before charging off after their classmates. He did not correct them. Mel watched them go with something like bemusement.
“Hey! You three, stop right there,” Rick shouted after the retreating figures. It had an effect like the crack of an overseer’s whip. They all jolted to a complete halt and turned around nervously.
“Ms Baker was your teacher for today. Not me. You should thank her.”
The three boys looked at each other nervously, uncertain of what to do. One of them finally said, “Thanks Miss,” and the other two followed suit. Then they surprised Rick, and Mel for that matter, by awkwardly bowing to her. She smiled and returned the bow.
“You boys hurry back to the bus, now,” she said, setting them free. They charged away.
“You’re pretty good at that,” Mel said. “You could do it for a living.”
“What? Teach judo?”
She shook her head, “No, just teach. You have a presence. Those guys,” she jerked a thumb back over her shoulder at the retreating knuckleheads, “they could really do with some presence in the classroom.”
Rick scoffed, “Reckon I’d rather be back in Fallujah.”
“Fair enough,” Mel shrugged. “But seriously, thanks. If you’ll let me, I’d like to buy you dinner to say thank-you properly.”
There it was. The moment that’d been coming for five or six weeks now. The moment that probably would have come a lot sooner if he didn’t feel as though negotiating even the simplest social transaction was something like finding his way through a minefield with a bayonet. He was smiling, but the smile was frozen on his face, and he didn’t know how to unfreeze it, and…
“You should probably just say yes,” Mel said. Her expression was not unreadable. Rick could see in her eyes an awareness of his sudden apprehension, and the surprising lack of fucks to give on her part.
“Yes, God yes,” he blurted out, “Oh shit,” he added, horrified at his ham-fisted response. “I didn’t mean…”
“How about I pick you up at six thirty tonight,” Mel said, touching him lightly on the arm. “You look like a steak man. I’ll book us a table at Morty’s. That way, if it’s a disaster, you can bring a doggy bag home for Nomi.”
Rick’s head with swimming with how fast this was going. For a second it felt exactly like the moment when she had unbalanced him and flipped him through the air to land on his ass in front of her class.
But it wasn’t.
They had been sidling up to each other for weeks now. He could’ve asked her out on a date at any time in the last month and she probably would have said yes. But he hadn’t, and with each chance that he let slip by it became easier to let the next one go, too.
“Okay,” he said, finding his voice at last. He swallowed. “1830 hours. I’ll lock it in.”
“Good,” Mel said. “It’ll be good.”
And it was and it wasn’t.
Having agreed to a date – he was pretty sure it was a date – Rick tried very hard not to think about, well, the date. He completed his rounds of the golf course, gathering up fourteen lost balls which he deposited into a basket at the clubhouse. He patched up half a dozen or so divots on the fairways, and made note of a torn net on one of the tennis courts. It would need to be replaced. As much as he was looking forward to meeting Mel for dinner, his anticipation threatened to tip over into anxiety if he gave more than a minute’s thought to it.
Instead he put in earphones and listened to some music. A Foo Fighters playlist of their slower tracks. He threw a stick for Nomi to chase and enjoyed the sun on his back and generally did his best not to think about something which he’d been thinking about for weeks.
He had first met Melissa when he was shopping for groceries at the Harris Teeter in Darnestown. Rick preferred to do his groceries online, but the site was down and he was getting short on rations. If he didn’t resupply, he’d be tucking into a big bowl of Nomi’s venison kibble for dinner.
Like most Labradors, Nomi was hugely sociable. Training constrained that natural friendliness, but her tail set to wagging as soon as she heard Rick grab the car keys from the bowl on his kitchen bench. She rode up front in the cabin. She would’ve been fine in the tray, but he preferred to have her next to him.
He played Joe Bonamassa’s Redemption album on the drive down to the market and they sang along together. Nomi’s love of a good blues howl was one of the things Rick most loved about her. The other was that he could trust her.
Being a service dog, Nomi was allowed inside Harris Teeter while your average mutt had to suffer the indignity of being tied to a bench outside. She trotted obediently alongside him, up and down the aisles as he filled his shopping bags; one full of fruit and vegetables and the other with a heavy pork shoulder he would slow cook down to spicy brisket.
The one place she was not allowed was inside the big meat locker at the back of the store. Highly trained service dog or no, state law would not countenance the idea.
“Stay,” Rick commanded, as he ducked into the cold room for his meat. He knew that he could be gone for half an hour and she would not bark, or fret, or leave her assigned post. Only if somebody tried to take her would there be any barking. Some growling and snapping too, if they didn’t get the message. He was inside for less than a minute, quickly gathering the large cut of pork shoulder he needed, before emerging to find a young woman hunkered down and deep in conversation with his dog.
Nomi was soaking up the attention and mugging for a selfie with her new friend.
“Help you, Ma’am?” Rick asked.
She didn’t look even a little bit embarrassed to be caught out loving it up with somebody else’s dog. The woman stood up and fairly beamed at him, unfolding an impressively athletic-looking body. She was dressed in black lycra and a Nike Run Club tee shirt.
“No, I’m doing just fine,” she said, giving Nomi one more head rub. “She is a beautiful dog. How old?”
A little taken aback, Rick drew a blank.
“I, er… I don’t…”
“You don’t know how old your dog is?” the woman asked, in an unfamiliar accent. It could have been English or maybe Australian.
“I do,” he said, feeling himself on the defensive for no good reason, it’s just…”
But Mel had lost interest in him, the delinquent dog owner, and she was leaning back down and kissing, yes actually kissing Nomi between the eyes. And Nomi was lapping it up, almost as if she knew how unsettled Rick was by the whole exchange.
“She’s three,” he said suddenly.
“Sorry?”
“She’s three years old,” he said, feeling it was important that he say it.
The woman seemed impressed.
“Still a puppy then, really. She is a very good girl. You’ve trained her well.”
“I didn’t train her, not entirely anyway,” he said. “She’s my therapy dog.”
The young woman appeared to accept this as a given.
“Were you a soldier?” she asked, but she went on speaking before Rick could answer, or try to evade her question, which he sometimes did when people asked him that. “My brother was a Marine. A Royal Marine,” she said.
English then.
“He went to Iraq three times. He’s all right. Said he loved it, actually. But some of the blokes he went over with, they did it tough, coming home. A couple of them had therapy dogs. I’m Melissa by the way. Melissa Baker. But just call me Mel.”
She held out her hand and smiled at him as if confident that there could be nothing he would want more in the world that to meet her and to just call her Mel. The hell of it was, she was right.
Maybe it was Nomi. If Nomi liked her, she had to be okay, and it was pretty obvious from the lolling tongue and big dopey lovestruck eyes that Nomi was all in on this just-call-me-Mel situation.
Rick shook her hand. Her grip was strong.
He hadn’t fallen for her, not then. He hadn’t really expected to see her again. It was just a pleasant meeting with a young woman who didn’t seem to care about his scars or his history or the darkness that he sometimes felt as a physical presence gathered around him. But a week later she’d appeared at the golf course, leading a bunch of high school kids through a self-defence class, and that was when he’d learned that she was an ex-cop. An ex-Bobby, she called herself, two years out of London and the police force and ‘well shut of all that rubbish and palaver.’ She was a qualified personal trainer now, studying in Baltimore for a high school teaching diploma, and paying her way through the degree by doing these classes up and down I-95, anywhere from DC to Philly.
He hadn’t offered to help with her classes; she’d insisted.
They got to know each other as she tossed him around like a bag of old laundry, and he had let himself be tossed.
It was maybe the third or fourth week of her picking him up and slamming him down and landing on his chest to pin his arms and mimic beating his face to a bloodied pulp, that Rick Boreham had realised that he really, really liked this woman.
He hadn’t come out of his cabin for two days after that.
And now, here he was, showered and shaved and pacing the very short distance between his living room and his kitchen, wondering whether he should shower again and change his clothes because he was pacing so much, and he was so nervous, that he probably, certainly, almost surely reeked of flop sweat. Nomi was curled up on her old sheepskin rug, tracking his path up and down, back and forth, tilting her head and staring at him as though he had gone mad from a poisoned tick bite.
“This is your fault,” he said to her, and she dropped her head to her paws, suitably chastened. “I should have another shower,” he said again. He had muttered the same thing to himself three times in the last ten minutes. This time, however, he actually started to head towards the bathroom, just before he heard tires on the gravel driveway and squinted as powerful headlights beamed in through the windows of his cabin.
It was her.
Rick cursed under his breath. There was no time for a shower. He would just have to go, reeking of stale sweat and desperation. That’s if Mel even agreed to go on with the date now. She’d probably gag and run back to her vehicle as soon as…
He heard boot heels clocking on the wooden steps, and three firm knocks on the front door. Keys jingled outside.
It was like the first crack of a rifle shot when the enemy opened contact. None of his uncertainty, his fears and doubts disappeared. But he had stuff to do now, so he did it.
A deep breath. Four strides to the door. Turn the handle, and…
“Hey Mel. You look great.”
Just like a normal person.
She smiled and said hello and walked in without being asked and then Nomi was bounding over to her, barking and wagging, and Rick took another deep breath and let it go and thought that maybe he could roll through this and maybe it would be all right.
10
System Crash
The world ended and the lights didn’t even flicker.
Of course it took a while before Jonas Murdoch, or anyone, realised that everything they knew had come to an end. Hundreds, hell no, thousands of years of western civilisation had real momentum to it. It’d keep rolling for a while, even after the engines choked out.
The sirens warbling and echoing throughout the giant warehouse cut through his confrontation with Travis Tamoreau like a heavy meat cleaver chopping down between them. The assistant manager, who’d looking genuinely terrified when Murdoch’s anger got away from him, now looked frightened and confused by whatever was happening on his laptop screen. His delicate, manicured fingers danced over the keyboard, but to no effect. Jonas couldn’t see what was happening on screen, but the little twink’s expression, the panicky bird-like flutter of his eyes, implied nothing good.
Jonas grinned.
He was done here. He didn’t need this shit anymore. He had another life waiting for him. Only one thing left for him to sort out. Who’d set him up? He couldn’t believe—he didn’t want to believe—it was one of the Dutch hotties he’d helped out last week. The answer was sitting on the cheap laminated surface of Tamoreau’s desk, in the thin, buff-coloured personnel folder.
Jonas casually leaned forward and picked it up. Tamoreau was so intent on stabbing his fingers uselessly at the keyboard that it took him a moment to realise Jonas had taken the file and was reading it. The violation of the master-servant relationship, of the inherent and accepted power imbalance, was so brazen that it finally pulled him out of his feedback loop with the malfunctioning computer. He almost leapt up out of his chair to grab back the papers.
“Hey! That’s confidential, you can’t…”
Jonas shoved him back down. It was only a light push, but Tamoreau was only a little guy. Jonas was not. And he was angry. The assistant manager fairly flew through the air, tripping over his office chair and crashing to the floor. Reaching for a handhold, he pulled a landline phone and a cup full of pens down on top of himself. Jonas ignored his outraged squeal. He was already speed-reading the reports in the personnel file with a strange mix of elation and resentment.
He was right.
The hotties hadn’t complained about him at all. As if they would. He’d been nothing but a gent to them. No, this was a fucking Yolanda special. She’d complained to Omar that Jonas would not take direction from her without attitude and pushback. That much was true. He’d give her that. But only because pretty much all of her directions were bullshit and sometimes even stupidly dangerous. It’d been Yolande, after all, who’d ordered the Dutchies to haul those industrial-sized sous vide cookers all the way over to dispatch, where the only clear stowage space that day was on a shelf twenty feet off the fucking ground. What were they gonna do? Deadlift the fucking things and levitate up there?
So yeah, Jonas hadn’t just cleaned up that mess. He’d let Omar know all about Yolanda’s stupidity. But he hadn’t sexually harassed her. That was insane. She was an ugly bitch with an ass so big and buttcrack hairy it needed its own crew of fire watchers when the dry summer months came on.
He tossed the report back on the desk. Tamoreau was trying to untangle himself from his chair and the phone line, but he was shaking so much he kept tripping over his own spindly limbs. Jonas ignored him. He threw the report back on to the desk and walked out. His reflection in the office window looked calm, but he knew himself. This was the anaesthetic numbness that so often preceded one of his eruptions. He stalked past Cindy on the front desk, who looked like she was quietly freaking out. He ignored her and she half-waved, half-smiled at him, before going back to her own screens, trying to make things happen that obviously didn’t want to happen.
Emerging from the offices and back onto the warehouse floor, Jonas was by the heat of the day and the blaring alarms. The fulfilment centre sounded as though it had fallen into chaos, but as his boots rang on the metal staircase, Jonas could see the opposite was true. Sirens howled and red and yellow warning lights flashed, but nothing moved. Most of the workers on the shop floor stood very still, craning their heads back and forth, looking for the source of the alarm. A few managers hurried back and forth, mostly running towards each other, taking excitedly for a few moments, and running off in different directions again. But Jonas could see what was wrong, at least in aggregate.
The entire operation has seized up.
System crash, he thought.
He’d only ever been through one before, but it had looked just like this.
He shrugged and kept walking down the stairs. Apart from the sirens, his boot heels clanging on the metal steps were the only sound he could hear in the vast cavern of Amazon’s frozen warehouse. He reached the floor and almost walked straight for the exit. He doubted they’d even pay him for this shift, and he knew he was done in Seattle anyway. He was the Centurion now, for better or worse.
He’d only given Tamoreau a playground push, but that little bitch was sure to file charges and Jonas already had the assault conviction in Florida. He was also about to add to his criminal record here in Washington state. His limbs felt loose as he walked back to his station. The buzzer in his electronic bracelet went off, helpfully reminding him that he was already overdue. He tore off the tracker and threw it away. A couple of co-workers saw him and called out, asking if he knew what was happening. He forced himself to smile and shrug, and he kept going.
He found Omar and Yolanda deep in conversation, agitated and so preoccupied with the disruption to operations that they didn’t notice him until he was on them.
