Phil put on a new album, something Craig didn’t recognize, and came over, sitting on the opposite end of the couch. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I don’t think it’s legal to kill someone’s pet. And that dog definitely had a collar.”
“Yes!” Craig said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
“We could probably report this to the cops or something.”
The conversations nearby had stopped, the department and division heads who had wanted nothing to do with any talk of the hunt, now listening carefully. Before Craig could bring them into the discussion, Robards appeared in the entrance to the dining room. “Dinner is served!” he announced loudly.
Reluctantly, Craig stood up from the couch. Phil went over to turn off the record player, and everyone made their way into the dining room. The lights seemed dimmer than they had yesterday, and Craig wondered if the generator was going.
They sat down on the benches, and Garrett Holcomb, the head of Phil’s department, brought plates of food to their aisle. Even in his peripheral vision, Craig could see the wide grin on Phil’s face as the department head served him. “Uh, Garrett,” he said, “can I get some coffee to go with this?”
“I’m not in charge of drinks,” Holcomb informed him.
Phil leaned over. “It’s so hard to find good help,” he told Craig.
The food on the plate was supremely unappetizing. Soggy string beans sat between an overcooked biscuit and a chunk of deep fried meat approximately as big as a hamburger. Craig took a bite of the meat, which was chewy, tasteless and almost impossible to get down.
“What are we eating?” he asked suspiciously.
Robards, nearby, overheard and answered the question. “You should know. You hunted it today.”
There was a clatter of silverware as shocked diners dropped their forks on the table. Matthews and Jack Razon, who, along with Robards’ wife, had been responsible for making the meal, had made no attempt to eat the food, and neither of them looked up, both staring guiltily down at their plates.
Had they butchered the animals? Craig wondered. Or had they merely watched while Edna did it?
He stared out the window. This retreat had turned violent and ugly. There were no skills they had learned here, they hadn’t grown closer, and there was nothing any of them would take away from the experience that they would ever use in their jobs or in their real lives. Not for the first time, he wondered about the real reason BFG had sent CompWare’s senior staff into the mountains. It was obviously a pretext for something—but what?
They would find out when they returned, he assumed, but he did not think it was information he was going to be happy to learn.
There was a talent show scheduled after dinner. Each person was supposed to get up and do some sort of act: recite a poem, sing a song, tell a story. But no one was in the mood, and it was Matthews who got them out of it, saying, “I think we’ll skip the talent show tonight.” Craig was grateful, and once again he was hoping to have an opportunity to talk to the CEO about this whole bizarre weekend, but Matthews announced, “I’m going to bed. I’ll see you in the morning,” and headed off toward his cabin. He sounded tired.
Somewhere nearby, a dog howled, a lonely sound that made Craig think of an animal that had lost its mate.
Craig and Phil were the last two remaining, everyone else going into their cabins for the night. “Parvesh is going to be impossible to live with now,” Phil said. “I dread going in there.”
“We’re heading home tomorrow.”
“Thank God.”
“I wonder if Matthews is going to rethink the consultants after this,” Craig said.
“I wonder if he’ll be allowed to.”
“You noticed that, too, huh?”
Phil nodded. “It’s like, after the merger fell through, he panicked and handed over all power of decision to BFG. Maybe he regrets it now, but I’m not sure what he can do about it at this point. CompWare’s probably locked in by contract, and if we hope to stay alive in the shark-infested waters of Wall Street, we’d better not show any weakness.”
“You sound like Matthews.”
“I’m just taking it from his point of view.”
Craig smiled wryly. “And on that dispiriting note…” With a lazy wave, he started toward his cabin, leaving Phil to decide whether to hang by himself for a while or go back in with Parvesh.
“Bastard,” Phil muttered.
“Sorry,” Craig said. “I’m tired.” And he was. It had been a long fucking day, not one that he wanted to remember but one he knew he wouldn’t forget. He knocked on the door of the cabin to make sure Elaine was decent. “Elaine?” he called. He heard no response, and used his key to unlock the door.
The room was dark and empty, but the bathroom door was closed, a sliver of yellow light outlining the edge of the frame. She was obviously in there, and immediately after he’d stepped into the cabin, she called out, “Craig? Is that you? I forgot my underwear and pajamas.” She opened the door a crack and held out her hand. “Could you hand them to me?”
He closed and locked the front door behind him, turning on the battery-powered light. He couldn’t pretend to be asleep; she’d heard him come in. And now she’d seen the light go on. Besides, he didn’t want her to come out naked or partially wrapped in a towel in order to get her clothes. So he said, “Okay. Hold on.” He looked around, frowned. “I don’t see them. They’re not on the bed.”
“Just open up my suitcase. They should be on top.”
They weren’t on top. What was lying on the carefully folded clothes was a bright red vibrator in the shape of an erect penis. Embarrassed, he moved it aside, picked up the folded pajama top and bottom, then grabbed a pair of lacy silk panties. The panties, he saw instantly, were crotchless.
Moving the vibrator back into place, he closed the suitcase, making no mention of any of this as he handed her the bundle of clothes and said, “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” she told him, closing the door.
As soon as she saw the underwear he’d given her, she would know that he knew they were crotchless. She already had to know that he’d seen her vibrator. Had she wanted him to see it? He wasn’t sure. But he didn’t want to deal with any of this, and for the second night in a row, he quickly changed into his pajamas, turned off the light, got into bed and closed his eyes, facing the wall, pretending to be asleep.
“Craig?” she whispered when she came out of the bathroom. “Are you awake? Craig?”
He didn’t answer, didn’t move, kept his breathing believably even, and, eventually, he drifted off.
He awoke shortly after midnight, prompted into consciousness by an exterior noise that broke through the artificial world of his dreams. He opened his eyes, staring upward into the darkness, hearing a shuffling in the gravelly dirt outside the cabin. Though the window next to his bed was closed, the silence was so all-encompassing that, even through glass, the smallest noise seemed amplified.
The shuffling sound was very clear.
A person was outside their cabin, and Craig listened, assuming it was Robards doing some sort of nightly rounds. But the shuffling did not go away, did not move on. Instead, it circled around the cabin until it was back again, and against his will, he thought of that stupid story Robards had told last night about the abandoned boy who became a cannibal and broke into cabins searching for victims.
The sound was close, seemingly right on the other side of the wall, and he sat up to see what he could through the dirty window.
A horrible wrinkled face stared back at him from the other side of the filthy glass.
Startled he sucked in his breath but, luckily, did not cry out. It was the old lady from the kitchen, he realized instantly, Robards’ wife—Edna— although what she was doing staring in at his room in the middle of the night he did not know. He glanced over at the other bed to make sure he had not awakened Elaine, and when he looked back, the face at the window was gone. He waited a moment to see i
f she would return, but the sound did not reappear and neither did that terrible visage.
Craig lay back on the bed. Robards was a strapping young guy. Could that hideous crone really be his wife? It didn’t make sense, something about it didn’t add up, and Craig wondered if the scenario was part of some elaborate psychological test, if BFG had brought them up here to monitor them under artificial conditions in order to gauge their reactions to certain purposefully introduced stimuli.
He was getting as paranoid as Phil.
He closed his eyes, trying to fall asleep, but though there were no more sounds, sleep did not come easy, and when it did, it was marred by dreams of dark forests and old ladies and a fiendishly grinning Regus Patoff eating a dead dog at an indoor picnic table while wearing a blood-stained bib.
THIRTEEN
Even if the bus driver hadn’t given them a lecture about being on time when they first arrived, no one was about to miss the ride back. They were all packed and ready to go after a sad breakfast of cold burnt toast and runny scrambled eggs prepared by two of the division heads from Finance, and the remaining hours were taken up with subdued conversations, and filling out a survey form about the retreat that was so carefully and precisely worded that there was no way possible to criticize their experience here.
Before leaving, they finally got their phones, tablets and iPods back. Craig tried to make a quick call to Angie, but there was still no service.
The problem continued for the entire return trip, and Craig wondered aloud if the bus was equipped with some sort of transmission blocker or scrambler.
“The guy reports to Patoff,” Phil noted, “so I wouldn’t be surprised.”
Dash Robards had seen them off, standing in the parking lot and waving goodbye, a handgun in a shoulder holster conspicuously visible. Craig had turned away, glad to be leaving, and was gratified to see that no one else was returning the man’s wave either. The weekend had been a disaster. None of them had had a good time, none of them had learned anything, and they were returning disgusted and demoralized—which was exactly the opposite of the retreat’s intent.
The bus driver was not the same one who had dropped them off on Friday, but he was equally hostile, and at a stoplight in San Bernardino he threatened to kick Phil off the bus for being disruptive and unruly. “You try it, and I’ll kick your ass,” Phil said to a chorus of cheers, and the bus driver, recognizing that he was outnumbered, seethed silently for the rest of the trip.
It was great to be back in the city. They got stuck in traffic on the Pomona Freeway as a result of an overheated car on one of the middle lanes; the day was so smoggy that the buildings of downtown had lost all detail and were little more than gray shapes in the white air…and it was wonderful. Already, the events of the weekend seemed fantastical and far away, as though they’d happened in a dream.
It was Sunday, but Regus Patoff was waiting for them when the bus pulled into the CompWare parking lot. He was standing in front of the building, wearing a bright blue bow tie, and his suspiciously colored flattop seemed even flatter than it had before. If his appearance was odd in the office, in the open air it looked positively clownish, and Craig wondered how anyone could take him seriously. They did, though. Not just at CompWare but at all of the other companies who’d hired BFG to streamline their operations.
Craig grabbed his suitcase from beneath the seat and was caught for several moments in the slow-moving stream of people trudging toward the exit at the front of the bus. From outside, he heard Patoff announce to the departing employees, “No one is to leave. Remain in front of the bus until you are told what to do.”
“Who does he think he is?” Phil said angrily. “He’s not my boss.”
Nevertheless, he stepped off the bus and moved to the side, waiting with everyone else. Craig did the same. The consultant was speaking in low tones to Matthews and the members of the Board, and a moment later, the visibly shaken CEO stepped back while Patoff called a meeting in the first floor conference room. “This will be quick,” he promised, “and afterward you may go home, but first there are some matters that need to be discussed.”
“Jesus,” Phil sighed. “Will this weekend never end?”
As they walked into the building, Craig tried to call Angie on both their home phone and on her cell, but the land line was busy, and he was forced to leave a message on the cell phone’s voicemail, telling her he would be there soon.
Both Matthews and Patoff walked up onto the stage, standing next to the podium, and as soon as everyone was seated, the CEO cleared his throat. “You’re going to hear this on the news tonight and read about it in the paper, but we thought you should learn about it here first.” Matthews took a deep breath. “Our recently resigned CFO Hugh Anderson and Senior Vice President Russell Cibriano both committed suicide yesterday.”
There were several gasps of surprise, as well as widespread whispering.
“It is indeed tragic. As you know, both men recently resigned after the Automated Interface merger did not go through, but they were both extremely competent professionals with extremely bright futures. I have no idea why either of them would do something so…drastic. Their deaths are a loss to their friends and families, their coworkers here at CompWare and our entire industry.”
“The upside,” Patoff offered, “is that, according to the terms of their resignations, the company is no longer on the financial hook for their retirement benefits. The golden parachutes given to these former employees—which, by the way, I would have advised against offering if BFG had been consulting for CompWare at that point—are cancelled. So, while I’m sure their loved ones and even some of you may be saddened by their departures, from a fiscal standpoint, their deaths are quite fortuitous for the company, particularly at this time.”
His remarks were greeted with shocked silence. Even Matthews and the members of the Board seemed stunned by the extraordinary callousness of the consultant’s words.
“As to how they died,” the consultant continued, “in case you all are wondering, Mr. Anderson hung himself, while Mr. Cibriano slit his wrists.”
Craig could not believe anyone, even Patoff, could be so heartless and unfeeling.
The consultant pressed a button on the podium, and a screen began lowering behind him. “A lot of you are probably wondering why you had to come into the building and into the conference room to hear this news. After all, we could have announced it to you either while you were on the bus or when you had just gotten off. The reason is that I put together a little PowerPoint presentation that I thought you might like.”
The lights dimmed.
“As you can see, I was able to obtain police photographs of both men.”
On the white screen behind him flashed a full color photo of Hugh Anderson hanging from an open beam in a neatly ordered garage. He was wearing a suit, and there was a large stain on his pants where he had wet himself. His head hung at a disturbing angle, his neck obviously broken, and both his face and his hands, at the ends of his loosely dangling arms, looked unnaturally dark.
“Here’s Mr. Anderson. He was found in his garage by a gardener, who had come to do the lawn. The gardener told Mr. Anderson’s wife, who called the police.”
The photo onscreen shifted to a close-up of the ex-CFO’s face, his purplish skin bulging and swollen; his tongue lolling between slack blackened lips; his bloodshot eyes so wide open they were practically popping out of their sockets.
“And here is Mr. Cibriano.”
The screen changed again.
“Mr. Cibriano, uncharacteristically unclichéd, from what I’ve learned of his personality, did not do the deed in the bathtub, but rather bled out in his marital bed, where he was discovered by his wife and daughter, who had just returned home from a shopping trip to Nordstrom’s.”
It was the most gruesome sight Craig had ever seen, an image he did not think he would ever be able to get out of his mind. Russell Cibriano, face contorted in agony, body twisted in anguish, l
ay on a bed drenched with red, severed veins visible in the sliced sections of wrist that gaped open and still appeared to be bleeding.
There were more pictures, but he could not bear to look and stared at the side wall instead of the screen, a tactic that more than one person in his sightline seemed to be following.
The lights came up again, and Craig turned his attention back to the podium, where a visibly upset Matthews told everyone to go home. “See you in the morning,” he said.
Phil was silent until they were back in the parking lot, walking toward their cars. Craig knew what his friend was going to say, and he wasn’t sure he disagreed. “Doesn’t it seem a little too coincidental that both Anderson and Cibriano happened to commit suicide on exactly the same weekend?” Phil asked. “And that all of our cell phones were confiscated so that we couldn’t find out this information for ourselves, leaving Patoff to control the message and determine exactly when and how we were told?”
Craig nodded. It was paranoid thinking, but it was also plausible. More than plausible. “And what was with those pictures?” he wondered aloud. “What was the point of that?”
Around them, others were talking in hushed tones about what they’d seen.
“A warning?” Phil said quietly.
Craig frowned.
“How else are we to take it? We’re herded in there to look at Faces of Death photos of two men Patoff told us were a drain on CompWare’s resources. I think he wanted us to know that if we cross him or step out of line…” He didn’t finish the thought.
“I don’t think so,” Craig demurred.
Phil shrugged. “Think what you want.”
The suggestion wasn’t as outlandish as it should have been, and Craig was still thinking about it as he and Phil waved goodbye to each other and split off, walking to their separate rides.
He’d been slightly worried about leaving his car in the CompWare parking lot for three days. Even in the nicest parts of Los Angeles, an unmoving vehicle was an invitation to thieves. But despite the fact that the lot was open and had no guard, his car was unmolested, and, grateful that something had finally gone right, he tossed his small suitcase on the passenger seat, got in and drove home.
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