Page 48 of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World
My anxiety growing steadily, I tried calling Eric several times that evening and got nothing but his voicemail. I couldn’t decide whether to be concerned or irritated, so I opted for both, and when he finally called back I answered the phone with a sharp “What’s going on? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Sorry to have been MIA. Things have been crazy.”
My voice softened a little. “You sound tired.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “I am.” After another pause, he said, “I can’t talk right now. But I’m glad you’re okay.”
Bewildered and a little hurt, I wished him a good night and listened as he hung up. Something had changed. I didn’t know what, or why, but our dynamic felt…off. Had he been more scared by the supposed mugging than I’d realized? Was that why he was keeping his distance?
Whatever the problem was, I had bigger things to worry about, including but not limited to the Conclave hunting me down, Management discovering what I’d done, Ms.Crenshaw firing me, and the looming end of humanity. My options were dwindling swiftly, but all I needed was one little breakthrough. I clung to that hope as tightly as I could, willing it to be true, while the end of everything drew steadily closer.
Seventeen
As it happens, interrupting anexecutive ritual has its consequences. I discovered as much the next morning when, shortly after I arrived at work, Ms.Crenshaw told me to turn right around and take the train up to the Ramble in Central Park. I was on cleanup duty, she said, and sent me down to the second floor to pick up a disposal kit from Janitorial Services. She didn’t say this was a punishment, but she didn’t have to. An hour later, staring at the unsavory remnants of a diabolical orgy, I knew perfectly well why I was there.
Our clients brokered their deals with the company in a variety of ways. Some preferred the traditional trappings of corporate power: executive boardrooms, documents filled with legal jargon, the satisfying scritch of a fountain pen nib against thick, creamy paper. Others preserved their anonymity with layers of digital encryption, contracting with us via faceless avatars and electronic signatures. And a select few petitioned the dark forces of the universeby taking their clothes off, drawing a massive pentagram in a secluded clearing, and having sex all over it.
Few places in Manhattan were better suited to such activities than the Ramble, a relatively untamed woodland sprawled across more than thirty acres in the southern half of Central Park. It had a reputation for seedy and sometimes criminal activities, though during the day it also played host to more wholesome pastimes like bird-watching and hiking. My destination was a large, irregular clearing a good distance away from the closest trail. It was very quiet there, the ubiquitous sounds of Manhattan entirely muted by greenery and replaced instead by the tentative trills and chirps of unseen birds. At the center of the clearing stood a dark chunk of rock, rising a foot or two from the ground, and around it someone had used a sharp blade to gouge a classic pentagram into the earth, encircled by the forty-nine names of the Lords of Sin and Vice. It had probably taken hours of painstaking work to create, but now much of it was smudged and disturbed, presumably by the frantic movement of sweaty bodies. The makeshift altar was covered with a sticky coating of blood, and a short distance away I spotted the crumpled plastic shape of an empty blood bag. In the old days, of course, the sacrifice would have been a living person, but using donated blood was both more economical and easier to hide than a corpse.
I stepped gingerly into the pentagram and then halted as something squished underfoot. “Oh god,” I muttered. “Please don’t be a condom. Please don’t be a condom. Please don’t be a condom.”
It was a condom.
Shuddering, I extracted a pair of latex gloves from my supplies and snapped them on before bending down to scoop the item in question into an industrial-size garbage bag. There was morewhere that came from, along with plastic cups half-filled with cheap red wine, joints smoked down to stubby roaches, and discarded items of clothing. In the soft midmorning light, it all looked pathetically shabby.
I was shaking a pair of lacy underwear off my gloved hand and into the garbage bag when I heard someone approaching. Who would be wandering this far from the trails that wound through the Ramble? Not an ordinary civilian. My mind jumped immediately to the worst possible conclusion: it had to be those two agents from the Conclave. Why hadn’t I paused to consider how vulnerable I would be out here? I needed to remember that I was being stalked by magical terrorists. Looking around, I started moving toward the trees, slipping on scattered detritus. I had to get away—no one would hear me here if I called for help. Garbage bag still clutched in one hand, I fumbled at a slender sapling and then looked over my shoulder in time to see a black-clad figure push their way through a loose mass of shrubbery and into the clearing, growling inaudibly as they batted leaves away from their mohawk.
I paused. “Lex?”
The stocky person stopped on the other side of the clearing. “Colin? Hey.”
“You scared the crap out of me,” I wheezed as I clutched at my chest.
Watching where they set their black combat boots, Lex drew closer, a duffel like mine hanging from their shoulder. “Sorry. I didn’t realize anyone else had been roped into this assignment.” They removed their aviator sunglasses and squinted at me. “What put you on orgy duty?”
“I messed up a meeting with Management,” I reported glumly. “You?”
Lex shrugged. “I tried to clean an ancient palimpsest and accidentally triggered a curse that made Clive’s extremities fall off.”
I thought about it for a moment. “Allof his extremities?” I finally asked.
Lex shrugged again.
Feeling a little queasy, I gestured to the ground around me. “Well, between us we should be able to get this finished before lunch.”
With a nod, Lex tossed their duffel on the ground and extracted a garbage bag of their own. “How many condoms have you stepped on so far?”
“Four.”
“Wow. That beats my personal best. Or is it personal worst?”
With both of us working, it took surprisingly little time to dispose of the last pieces of incriminating evidence in the ritual clearing. Lex used their combat boots to scuff out the rest of the pentagram while I spritzed the blood-covered rock with an enzymatic solution and cleaned it as best I could with a couple of small towels. Those towels went into the garbage as well, along with my latex gloves. Then I tied up the plastic bag before stowing it in the duffel, to be disposed of later in the company incinerators.
“Not bad,” Lex judged as we studied our handiwork. The clearing still looked a little trampled in places, but certainly no worse than anywhere else in the Ramble. You’d never know that several people had lost their souls there. “Wanna head back together?”
“Sure.” I followed them as they tromped back into the trees, and eventually we emerged south of the quaintly archaic turrets and battlements of Belvedere Castle. Following the 79th Street Transverse, we ambled along at a moderate pace, headed for the 81st Street station and a train that would take us back to Midtown. The city,which had seemed so distant while we were in the Ramble, gradually enfolded us once more in its comforting haze of noise, exhaust, and grime.
“Do you remember the thing we talked about?” I asked eventually.
