Page 2 of Brody
I wanted to keep arguing, but there was no point. Dick was just a middleman manager. He may be the one to relay orders to the rest of the workers, but he wasn’t the one who made the decisions. I had no choice but to turn my back on that cramped little office, slamming the door hard enough to nearly rip it from its hinges as a final punctuation on my anger.
“Two hours,” I grumbled to myself as I weaved my way between machinery and stacks of already cut logs to find the rest of my crew. “It’s a joke, is what it is.”
I’d only just arrived for my shift, and I already wanted to be back home. The incident with the body we’d found and theMothers of the Mountaincult still hadn’t been fully resolved. It’d been two weeks since Magnus and Trent returned from their last trip out to the hidden mausoleum, and so far, no one else had bothered us, but I didn’t trust the situation to stay so calm. Although I usually enjoyed my job as a lumberjack, I would have skipped out on my shifts and stayed home if I could.
Unfortunately, we still needed money to live, and Magnus couldn’t support us just by moonlighting as a cage fighter.
The other lumberjacks on duty were, unsurprisingly, just as upset by the order as I was. After shouting complaints for a few minutes—and other less savory threats—we eventually decide to just say “fuck it” and start getting everything moved.
The higher-ups were undoubtedly going to be upset when we couldn’t meet their impossible deadline, but what could they actually do about it?
If they fired us, then they’d have to move the equipment themselves, and the prissy little suits that owned the logging company would never do that.
In the end, we managed to get everything moved over to the new site in less than four hours, which was already a miracle. When Dick came out to inspect the work after his office space was set up again, he had a phone held up to his ear. I could tell from the expression on his face that whoever was on the other line was probably yelling at him to speed things up.
“They want us to start on the north side,” he said while covering the speaker of his phone with one hand.
I’d just looked at the surveyor’s map, so I already had a good idea of the landscape, but I double-checked it again just to be sure. “That area’s on a steep slope. Anything we cut there is going to roll. It would be better to start on the south side where the land is flatter.”
Before I’d even finished, Dick was already shaking his head.
“The south side is too dense. We’d have to clear things out first in order to get the machines out there. There’d be no actual productivity until tomorrow. Start on the north side and harvest what lumber you can while we get another team to start clearing out the south side.”
It was a terrible plan. There was no way we’d have enough time to properly survey the lower side of the slope. We’d basically be cutting down trees and letting them fall blindly, hoping they didn’t land on anything.
Dick turned away from me, talking into his phone to assure whomever he was talking to that we would follow their orders.
I grabbed his shoulder and forcibly turned him around, so he’d have no choice but to hear me.
“I want it in writing.”
“What?” He scowled, but then his eyes trailed up to look at me, reminding him of our height difference. Dick wasn’t a small man. He probably wasn’t used to having to raise his eyes to meet someone’s gaze.
“I want these orders in writing. If you want to rush and do things out of order, fine. But I won’t be held responsible if anything goes wrong, so I want this order in writing.” I crossed my arms over my chest in a move that I knew emphasized the scarscrisscrossing over my forearms and the general width of my shoulders.
Dick instinctively took a step back.
“All right. Fine. I’ll get an email sent to you. Just… get started on your job.”
His last words were probably meant to be a command, but they lost all authority as he scurried away and darted back into the safety of his office.
Laughing quietly to myself, I let my shoulders slump.
I’d put on some weight in the last few years, especially after retiring from the military. The flat stomach and chiseled physique I’d once had during my boot camp days were a long-forgotten memory, replaced by love handles and a soft stomach. I didn’t feel as powerful as I had in my youth, but apparently, I could still put up an intimidating appearance when I wanted.
Oh well.
What else could I expect at forty-six years old?
At least I was still more fit than most, and perfectly capable of doing my job.
It was well past noon when the first tree fell. Much later than usual, though sooner than I expected. Our work progressed slowly, as we were trying to set up and move forward at the same time.
I usually preferred to be on the front lines of manual labor, running the machines or hooking chains around the newly felled logs to haul them away. I especially preferred the moments whenI could pick up an axe or saw and hack away at the wooden trunk with the strength of my own hands.
Today was not that kind of day.
We were on a time crunch, so I jumped behind the controls of a harvester machine and got to work cutting down whatever trees were within safe reach.
