Page 8 of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World
Lying on my bed, I traced the card’s edges over and over again as the apartment gradually grew quiet and still around me. I knew that calling on that faceless thing for help was almost certainly a bad idea. On the other hand, I liked being alive, or at least preferred being alive to being dead. My present existence was dull and dissatisfying and occasionally humiliating, but there was always a chance that something good would come along. Maybe, somewhere out there, the love of my life was waiting for me. I’d never find him if I was quietly disposed of by Dark Enterprises at the age of twenty-seven.
That creepy Thing had told me I was destined for greatness. Wouldn’t someone destined for greatness do whatever it took to survive? The key, I suspected, was asking for something relatively small. The more lavish the request, the more likely it would gohorribly wrong. Perhaps I could ask the Thing to get rid of Sunil—no muss, no fuss, just a tragic accident followed by a well-attended memorial service. I’d still be stuck in that cubicle, though, surrounded by people who disliked me, until the next supervisor decided to make my life difficult.
Shifting restlessly, I told myself that I was thinking too small. I needed to aim higher. What did I really, truly want? What would change everything for the better?
The answer came to me as if it had been waiting in the wings for this very moment:power. I wanted people to give me the obsequious smiles I gave Ms.Kettering. I wanted the Sunils of this world to fear me. I wanted respect. I wanted authority. I wanted tomatter.
Staring sightlessly up at the darkened ceiling, I imagined what I could do with real, genuine power. I’d be safe from Ms.Kettering’s cold eyes and Sunil’s homicidal pettiness. And who knew how high I might climb eventually? Maybe, someday, both of them would answer to me.
On my way in towork the next morning, stuffed into an overcrowded subway car with a thousand other commuters, I realized that someone was watching me.
He was tall, blandly attractive in a forgettable way, and wearing big, steel-rimmed glasses that were either retro or German. Like me, he was gripping an overhead strap and swaying along as the subway barreled through a tunnel. Hadn’t he been standing on my platform before the train arrived? Those glasses were familiar somehow.
Every few seconds, his gaze darted to me and then away again. Did I have something on my face? Was my hair sticking up? I did a nonchalant self-check. Everything seemed normal. Maybe he likedmy bow tie—itwaspretty sweet, what with the polka dots. I adjusted it a little self-consciously, then met his eyes when he looked at me again. His head jerked a little as he turned away. Was this flirting, I wondered, by someone even more awkward than me? When I finally disembarked at my stop and began climbing the stairs up to the street, I glanced back and saw those glasses following at a discreet distance. By the time I reached Dark Enterprises, though, the man had disappeared, leaving me to shrug and chalk it up to one of those weird subway encounters you have every once in a while.
I barely glanced at the receptionist on duty as I crossed the lobby and waited for an elevator to carry me up to my cubicle and whatever fresh torments Sunil had devised for me. I could feel the business card in my pocket as if it weighed ten pounds. Until I figured out exactly what to do, I intended to carry it everywhere I went.
When an elevator arrived, I shuffled inside and pressed the button for the sixth floor. The doors were starting to slide closed when a voice called out crisply, “Hold the elevator, please.” Instinctively, I jabbed theDOOR OPENbutton and a Black woman stepped into view. She was a little taller than me in three-inch heels, with hair shaved down to her scalp and cool eyes that appraised me briefly before she inclined her head in silent thanks.
I tried not to goggle openly. This was Ms.Crenshaw, CEO of the New York office and, until now, someone I’d seen only on promotional brochures meant for clients. I was sharing an elevator with theCEO. It was like standing next to a rock star. “Wh-which floor?” I stammered.
“Thirteen.”
As the doors slid shut, I studied Ms.Crenshaw surreptitiously. Her sleeveless blouse matched her bright red lipstick and she held an expensive-looking briefcase at her side, but what I noticed morethan anything else was her sheer presence. Simply standing there, she radiated poise and confidence. I wanted to be just like her—not a Black woman rocking a sweet pencil skirt, but powerful, assured. No one had ever gotten into an elevator with me and thought,Now there’s someone important. There’s someone who matters. Most people never noticed me at all.
But what if I worked up on the thirteenth floor, like she did?
Everyone knew the company’s executives wielded dark magicks and communed with forgotten gods. They were the secret masters of the world, pulling strings and exchanging favors from their branch offices around the globe, shaping society to Management’s specifications. Standing next to Ms.Crenshaw, I wanted what she had with a sudden, fierce desperation that felt like pain. If I could gain a foothold on the thirteenth floor, no one would laugh at me or ignore me ever again. And if they did—
“Isn’t this your floor?”
Her question jolted me out of my reverie. I blinked at her and then at the open elevator doors, beyond which lay the beige environs of Human Resources. “Sorry,” I mumbled before hurrying past her. As the elevator carried on to the exalted heights of the executive suites, I touched the business card in my pocket. My talisman. I still had qualms about asking that Thing for help, but as the walls closed in around me, at least now I could see a sliver of light off in the distance, a chance for something I’d always craved. All I had to do was take that final leap.
Wednesday and Thursday both passedin a haze of trepidation and uncertainty. I carried that business card everywhere, even slept with it under my pillow, but though my time was running out,I couldn’t bring myself to use it. I kept waiting for some miracle to save me, even as Ms.Kettering prowled the edges of the cubicle farm like a polyester-clad predator scenting the air for weakness.
Thursday evening, I had the apartment to myself. Amira was out with some of her fellow grad students, talking about particles or whatever. I was no longer invited to these gatherings after I’d made some salacious remarks about top and bottom quarks. (“It’s not what you said,” Amira told me later. “It’s that you waggled your eyebrows when you said it. People felt unsafe.”) Everything was dark and still, noise from the street below drifting in through an open window. Having consumed several episodes of instantly forgettable feel-good TV nonsense, I shuffled off to bed, pausing first to close the window.
Glancing down at the street, I noticed that someone was standing opposite our building, cloaked in shadow. Ordinarily, there would be nothing unusual about that, but the way this person stood, the tilt to their head, almost made it look like they were staring right at me. Then they shifted, and the harsh yellow glow of a nearby streetlight played across a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. Retro, maybe. Or German.
I knew those glasses.
The guy from the subway was standing outside.
Stepping away from the window, heart racing, I turned off the lights in the living room. What was going on? His loitering outside couldn’t be a coincidence. Had he followed me home from work? Sidling up to the window again, I peeked outside. He was still there, glasses gleaming in the dark, gaze pointed right at me.
As I stared down at him, I experienced a terrifying epiphany. He had to be part of the Firing Squad, the remediation team thathandled employee terminations at Dark Enterprises. That was why he knew my address, why he’d followed me that morning. Ms.Kettering had placed my name on a list of soon-to-be-fired employees, and he was waiting for the clock to run out.
I sagged against the wall next to the window as my body broke out into a cold sweat. This was really happening. I had, what—four more days? Unless Ms.Kettering decided before then that I was a liability. Sunil was still doctoring my reports, after all. What if the company decided to terminate me early so they could have someone new in place by the weekend? That made sense, actually. Get them up to speed so they could hit the ground running first thing Monday morning. Minimize disruption, maximize workflow. Remove inefficiencies sooner rather than later. Ensure a smooth ramp-up in productivity so quarterly targets remained within reach.
Oh god. He was there to kill me.
Panic welled up inside me as I stumbled on rubbery legs into the bathroom. Pawing through my shelf in our tiny medicine cabinet with shaking hands, I grabbed my disposable razor. Then I hurried into my bedroom and fished the business card out of my work khakis, placing it on my cheap particleboard desk. I didn’t hesitate before carefully slicing the razor across the pad of my index finger, watching as blood welled up, darkly red. Dropping the razor, I picked up the card and smeared my blood across one side, then turned it over. Slowly, a series of white letters swam up out of the blackness, shifting and twisting until there were two lines of text printed across the card. My voice sounded thin and small as I read them aloud. “ ‘Shadow-Made-Flesh, I call to you. Hear me and attend. A promise for a promise, a gift for a gift—so is our bargain made, sealed with blood and desire.’ ”
Holding my breath, I waited. Nothing happened. I looked around my bedroom, half expecting to see the Thing standing in the corner, but I was alone.
With a mixture of disappointment and relief, I let the card fall back onto my desk. I knew it had sounded too good to be true. Maybe I was being punked, and somewhere out there, that creature was sitting around with its faceless friends, all of them laughing at me while they drank beer and high-fived one another. Deflated, I took a step toward the living room. I needed to know if that man was still standing outside.
There was a rustling sound behind me, like dead leaves skittering across the ground or the dry rasp of a snake’s coils as it unwound its body. It was coming from the bed. Slowly, I turned.
