The Consultant

by Little,Bentley

  “Where is he?”

  “The consultants are leaving. They’ve done their job.”

  “He,” Craig said. “Not they.”

  Phil sounded forlorn. “We’re on our own now. We’re all alone.” His voice was filled with sudden fury. “BFG failed!”

  “Good,” Craig said. “That’s what we wanted, remember?”

  His friend—

  ex-friend

  —shook his head as though trying to free it from confusing thoughts.

  The lobby was starting to fill with workers entering from the elevators and stairwell. As though summoned by a dog whistle audible only to them, they arrived individually, in pairs and in packs.

  Packs?

  Yes, there was something almost wolflike in both the way they arrived and immediately began circling in, and in the nearly identical expressions on their faces. It wasn’t all of them, of course, but too many for comfort, and Craig saw that the lobby entrance was now blocked to him.

  But at least his family and the others had gotten out.

  And were hopefully calling the cops.

  From elsewhere in the building came the staccato sound of automatic gunfire.

  “There’s nothing left for us,” Phil said.

  “You’re talking nonsense,” Craig told him.

  “CompWare wasn’t worthy.”

  He almost made a Wayne’s World joke, but he could tell from Phil’s face that it would not be appreciated. “I’m glad BFG’s leaving. Now we can get back to doing what we’re supposed to do: create software packages.” He attempted a rapprochement. “And you’re in charge.”

  Phil didn’t take the bait. Behind him, the lobby was getting crowded. As in the parking lot the morning after the retreat in the maze, when they had learned of Austin Matthews’ suicide, the CompWare employees had separated themselves by department and division. There seemed a competitive aspect to it this time, however, as though workers remained within their own group not because they felt more familiar and comfortable with their immediate coworkers but because they didn’t want to associate with people from other groups. It was almost a hostility, and Craig wondered what the consultant had done or said to obtain that result.

  “You are my sworn enemy,” Phil said again, softly, threateningly.

  “I’ve had enough of this shit.” Craig tried to push past the other man, but Phil moved to block him. Other employees— salespeople and personnel from Phil’s division—massed behind Phil protectively, and Craig saw that many of them had in their hands office supplies that could be used as weapons: scissors, staplers, letter openers, laser pointers, box cutters, sharpened pencils, metal rulers.

  “A fight to the death!” Phil announced. “Programming versus Sales!”

  Craig frowned, confused. “What?”

  As if on cue, the various factions in the lobby stepped back, forming a rough perimeter around the open middle section of the floor. Phil’s Sales force fanned out around him like one of the gangs from West Side Story. Craig looked over at the programmers, who were standing together some ways off to his left. They seemed just as baffled as he was.

  “No one’s fighting anyone!” Craig declared.

  “Fight or die,” Phil said, and his smile made it clear which one he’d prefer.

  “We don’t even have any weapons!” Huell shouted.

  “What the fuck is going on?” Rusty muttered to no one in particular.

  Not all of the gathered employees were in lockstep, Craig noticed. For every brainwashed gung ho would-be soldier, there were two noncombatants who were frightened, bewildered and wanted nothing more than to get out of the building. Indeed, several employees had left the lobby and were sprinting across the darkened parking lot, following Angie and the others, but that avenue of escape was no longer an option. The uniformed guards were back, faces still hidden by paper bags, and they stood with their cradled weapons in front of the doors, ready to repel anyone who attempted to flee.

  “Everyone get back to work!” Craig announced loudly. “Just stop this nonsense and go back to your desks!”

  “Attack!” Phil cried.

  Those competing commands led to a chaotic free-for-all in which charged-up salespeople attacked programmers who were trying to get to the elevators, while individuals from other divisions and departments joined in the fracas, either trying to protect those who were being assaulted or assailing people themselves. Craig could only hope that the police would arrive soon, because this could not continue for long without resulting in serious injury.

  Or death.

  That was what the consultant really wanted.

  Phil came at him, an expression of irrepressible rage etched deeply into his ordinarily placid face. Phil was one of the few assailants without a weapon, and because of that, Craig was able to go low and bring him down, tackling him around the waist and throwing him into the swinging door of the women’s restroom. Lisa Goldberg, wielding a wooden clipboard she held by its metal clasp, attempted to protect her boss and swung at Craig’s head as he got to his feet. He easily sidestepped her, causing her to tumble on top of Phil, and he quickly grabbed a broom from one of the custodians, swinging the long stick in front of him in order to clear a path through the melee. Several men and women ran past him, pushing through the stairwell door and hurrying upstairs in an effort to get away from the violence.

  The rampage had spilled out through broken windows and glass doors onto the campus and was now a genuine riot. Dozens of people were fleeing into the maze chased by pursuers who seemed to have found actual weapons: baseball bats, axes, knives, swords. One of the cars in the parking lot appeared to be on fire. Inside, computer terminals from the security station were being thrown to the floor and smashed. Mild mannered employees who had never even had the temerity to call in sick before were now purposefully destroying company property and aggressively battling with coworkers.

  Throughout it all, the bag-headed guards remained in place and unmoving, and Craig couldn’t help wondering what would provoke them to action—and what would happen then.

  The swinging broom had cleared a path for him through the brawling crowd, and he reached the programmers, who were surprisingly unhurt, given the fact that they’d been attacked by Sales and had had no weapons. Only Rusty appeared to have been seriously injured, and he sat on the floor with his back to a wall, holding a wadded-up woman’s blouse to a wound on the side of his face. Several of the programmers were very large, however, and while very little of that bulk was muscle, it had obviously aided in repelling Phil’s people.

  Where was Phil?

  Craig looked toward the restrooms, but the area was filled with struggling secretaries and paralegals, and he couldn’t tell if Phil, or anyone else for that matter, was behind the fighters.

  Both Huell and Benjy were clutching letter openers they’d taken from their attackers, and Craig sidled up to them. “So what do we do now?” Huell asked.

  Lorene appeared at his side. “The front door’s open and not exactly guarded,” she said. “If we can make our way over there and slip between some people, we can probably get out.”

  “Good idea,” Craig said. “You guys do that. My wife’s out there somewhere—probably far down the street by now—and I’m sure she’s called 911. The cops should be here soon. In the meantime, I’m going to see if I can stop all this before someone gets killed.”

  “How?”

  “By going straight to the source.”

  “Patoff?” Benjy said.

  Craig nodded.

  “I’m coming, too.”

  Four of the programmers decided to accompany him. Several others had already taken off, and Hong-An chose to stay and help Rusty get outside so he could be ready for transport when an ambulance showed up, but Huell, Cuong, Lorene and Benjy went with him on a stealth mission across the lobby, where the crowd was thinning out, the fight being taken outside and up the stairs. Phil may have started this battle, but it had long since grown out of those confin
es. Employees weren’t fighting for or against Phil, they were just fighting, egged on by circumstance to wanton destruction. Papers were flying everywhere, more glass was shattering, smoke from the fires was drifting over all.

  Heading to the elevators, they gathered converts along the way, much more than Craig could have ever expected or predicted, angry employees who somehow figured out where the programmers were going and wanted in on it. It was a lynch mob, and he was at its head, and though he should have had qualms about that, he did not.

  An elevator arrived, the doors sliding open to let out a battered, bloody group of terrified men and women who immediately ran screaming along individual trajectories into the heart of the increasingly smoky lobby.

  When the doors of the adjacent elevator opened seconds later, no one ran out. The people inside this elevator were dead, piled on top of each other in such a way that there was no space between them, fitted together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle so that they formed a wall of heads and feet and arms and torsos, many of them naked, most of them bloody. He recognized quite a few of the corpses, and sadness threatened to overwhelm horror as he looked into the lifeless eyes of Matthews’ secretary Diane. A pink Facilities and Equipment form had been stapled to Diane’s forehead, and Craig didn’t have to move closer and read it in order to know what it said.

  These people had been surplused out.

  Sickened, Craig entered the first elevator, along with everyone else who could fit inside. There were nearly a dozen of them, with an equal or greater number left out, and before the doors slid shut, Craig told the others to follow as soon as they could.

  Staring up at the lighted numbers above the door, he had no idea what they were in for, what they would find. This was a foolhardy move, a strategy conceived entirely without logic or reason. But with all that had happened, he was still alive, had remained relatively untouched, and he believed that to be because the consultant had other plans in mind for him. He needed to take advantage of this protection and confront the consultant directly—

  kill him

  —before the police arrived and his chance was lost. Still holding onto the broom, he asked Julio Ortiz if he could swap the broom for a claw hammer the custodian was carrying. A frightened Julio acquiesced, and Craig hefted the hammer in his hand as the elevator doors opened.

  The seventh floor.

  It had changed yet again. He wasn’t sure what he had been expecting, but it had been along the lines of what he’d encountered last time—floors and walls covered in blood—or what he’d found on the second floor—industrial darkness and people hooked up to electricity. It definitely was not the sight that greeted them as they stepped off the elevator. For they found themselves in a generic business office: CompWare without the modernist touches. A single room the size of a football field, it was well-lit and divided into cubicles by metal-framed partitions. The room walls and partition walls were a uniform off-white, and both the floor and acoustic ceiling panels were the slightly lighter color of unlined paper. Craig smelled smoke, but the whiff of it was faint, as though seeping in from another world, and the dominant odor was of printer ink and toner. Muzak issued softly from speakers situated in the ceiling next to air-conditioning vents.

  “We stay together,” Craig said.

  There was a musical ding behind them as another elevator arrived, and those employees joined Craig’s group as they hugged the wall to the left, walking past the warren of cubicles, searching for the consultant.

  Why had he come up here? Craig asked himself. What did he hope to achieve? The consultant was not human, was beyond human, and there was no way he could hope to fight against something that possessed the sort of power wielded by the consultant. He should have tried to get out of the building, find his family and wait for the police.

  But he hadn’t.

  Something had compelled him to search out the consultant, something had drawn him up here, and he wondered if he was unknowingly doing the consultant’s bidding.

  So far, the cubicles they passed had been empty, but that changed. A temporary partition wall blocked the way forward, forcing them to turn right and walk down an aisle between open workspaces. Here, the cubicles were populated by people who appeared to have died at their desks. At one, Anthony, Phil’s new right-hand man, the one who had brought the news of Parvesh’s unfortunate “accident,” lay dead in a chair, frozen in place, eyes wide open, face contorted in agony, phone held to his ear. Next door, the “doctor” who had taken the sample for his blood test was slumped lifelessly over his workstation, one hand clutching a hypodermic needle. The trail of dead continued as they made their way up the aisle, all of them men and women Craig recognized as being affiliated with BFG.

  He saw Mrs. Adams, his observer, lying on the floor with her legs splayed and her skirt hiked up.

  The instrumental Muzak had disappeared sometime in the last few minutes, replaced by a church spiritual, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” that sounded as though it were being sung in a nearby room by a live choir. Only…

  Only the words were wrong.

  May the bastards

  All be broken

  Right damn now, Ralph

  Right damn now

  “What the fuck?” Huell said under his breath.

  Craig looked over the tops of the partitions, trying to see if there were any doorways in the wall that might lead to another room where the choir could be singing. The idea of a cappella singers in an office made no sense at all, and even as he scanned the side wall, the singing voices faded away, replaced by a generic instrumental version of “Girl From Ipanema” from the speakers in the ceiling above.

  Ahead, the labyrinth of cubicles ended, and the office beyond was an oversized version of a Mad Men-era executive suite, with low Danish modern tables, blocky chairs and sofas, and bland hotel art framed on walls that were spaced so far apart a four-lane highway could fit between them. At the far end, barely visible, was a gigantic wooden desk.

  Craig could see in the structure of this office the bones of that terrible bloody room where he had faced the consultant before. Its size and the placement of the desk were roughly the same, as though one room had been superimposed over the other, and Craig wondered if what they were seeing was real or if their minds had been clouded to think this is what they were seeing.

  Or had he been misled last time?

  Maybe the office and the abattoir were both real.

  “What do we do?” Lorene asked, but Craig didn’t answer, just kept walking forward.

  Behind him, those employees who had come up from the first floor followed in single file, like children on a field trip. Their presence gave him courage, and his gait grew quicker and more assured as he proceeded across the massive office. In front of him, the desk was no longer a desk but a strange creature of approximately the same color and size. It was as though the tableaux at the far end of the room had become less hazy and was growing sharper the closer they came to it, only the desk had been well-defined to begin with. The object had not grown clearer with their approach, it had changed, and it was changing still, moving from all fours to two legs, standing, and though it was not in any way, manner or form human, Craig knew that it was the consultant.

  Craig stopped. He was still several yards away but was afraid to get any closer. In his hand, he clutched the hammer tightly. The others who had been walking behind, spread out next to him, holding tightly to their own weapons.

  The consultant stood before them, naked, his body a grotesque grayish brown, leathery skin covering a skeletal structure more raptor than man. His face was horrible: cold lizard eyes above a beaklike nose and hard lipless mouth. The age Craig had briefly sensed in him before was now evident to anyone who looked at him.

  Craig took the offensive. “What are you?”

  “I’ve had many names.”

  “Oh, this is going to be one of those conversations?”

  The consultant smiled in a manner that was far too wide and reve
aled teeth he should not have had.

  “You destroyed our company.”

  There was a chorus of assent.

  “BFG didn’t destroy your company,” he said. “You did that.”

  “You got rid of half our workforce,” Craig countered. “Whoever you didn’t lay off, you killed.”

  “When you arrived to work tonight, this was CompWare. If you had gone to your offices and workstations, if you had done your jobs, it would still be CompWare. But you threw a tantrum, like spoiled children, and you fouled your own workplace.”

  There was a truth to that, Craig knew, but it was a partial truth. The riot downstairs had only hastened what was going to happen anyway. The consultant had put them on this path. He had not been able to turn CompWare into the perfect company he wanted, so its fate held no interest for him. He didn’t care what happened to it, and it seemed to amuse him to watch it devolve.

  “You’re a failure,” Craig said.

  The consultant nodded in agreement. “I am.”

  Someone off to the right—Benjy?—threw a stapler at the monster. It stopped in midair, hanging suspended in space for several seconds. Without taking his eyes off Craig, the consultant caused the stapler to whip back twice as hard and twice as fast as it had been thrown originally, hitting Benjy in the side of the head, then Cuong, both of them going down, screaming. Beneath, the floor trembled as though they were experiencing an earthquake.

  The smile came again, and Craig glanced briefly away, unable to face all those teeth.

  “You are a worthy adversary,” the consultant said. “I’ve had my eye on you from the beginning. I even admire the way you’ve handled your buddy’s completely unwarranted ascension to the head of this dying firm. It’s why I called this meeting today. I thought the two of us should have a discussion.”

  Craig met those cold reptilian eyes. “We have nothing to discuss. And you didn’t call me here.”

  But he had, hadn’t he? That was why Craig had come upstairs instead of going out to join his family. He felt disoriented, as though he were not in charge of his own thoughts. He was aware that Lorene and several other people had coalesced around Benjy and Cuong to make sure they were okay, and he felt guilty that he’d made no effort to check on their injuries himself. They were only up here because of him.