The Consultant
Page 39
He shook it off. “I assume you’re done here? You’re leaving?”
“Almost time,” the consultant conceded. “A few more loose ends to tie up…”
“Like what?”
“Like you.” The consultant was changing. Although he had not put on clothes, he was now wearing a business suit: gray pants, white shirt, red tie and gray jacket. He was faceless. Smooth skin covered the flat area where his features should have been. This, Craig suspected, was his true appearance, his real self. The monster from moments before had been their projection of him made flesh, but the consultant was not that sort of cartoon evil. His malevolence was more subtle, more insidious. He corrupted from within rather than from without, and the faceless businessman in front of them was the perfect embodiment of what he really was.
“I’m inviting you to join the team, to become a part of BFG.”
The consultant had no mouth and so could not speak, but his voice sounded clearly in Craig’s head, and it was obvious from the expressions on their faces that the others could hear him, too.
“Never,” Craig vowed.
“There are benefits—”
“Never.”
The faceless man shrugged. “It is your choice.”
Benjy and Cuong were jerked into the air and slammed into the ceiling, their feet kicking the faces of those administering to their wounds as they rocketed upward. The air suddenly felt thick, heavy, and a swirling wind caused everyone’s hair to stick up straight.
Without thinking, acting purely on instinct, Craig rushed forward. They all must have had the same impulse because everyone was rushing the consultant simultaneously, and before the wind could grow, before others could be hurled into the ceiling or thrown against a wall, they were upon him, makeshift weapons pounding, hacking, slashing. Craig raised his hammer and brought it down, claw-end first, on the consultant’s right arm, feeling a satisfying crunch as metal sank through flesh and hit bone. Then he was jostled aside as other employees pushed their way in, eager to administer their own personal justice.
Falling onto his stomach, Craig crawled out of the dogpile. The consultant’s voice in his head was silent, the wind was gone and the thickness of the air had dissipated. The only noises in the office were the grunts and cries of attacking employees.
He looked up at the ceiling, saw nothing, then looked down and saw Cuong’s and Benjy’s lifeless bodies lying in a contorted heap on the floor.
The sounds of violence were becoming more disturbing—wetter—and Craig stood. “Stop!” he ordered. He wasn’t anyone’s boss other than the programmers, but the mob listened to him, the fray petering out as employees backed off and separated. The consultant’s body lay there, bloody and unmoving.
But it wasn’t the consultant’s body.
It was Phil’s.
That was impossible. Craig had been staring into that blank face as he’d pounded the arm with his hammer. It had been the consultant’s. And Phil was downstairs somewhere or on another floor. There was no way the two could have been switched.
But the proof lay before him.
The consultant was gone.
And Phil’s dead body, cut and beaten by his fellow workers, was on its back, eyes in the battered face staring upward into nothingness. Craig was reminded of a figure on the cover of some album, but, try as he might, he could come up with neither the name of the band nor the title of the record.
Phil would know, he thought, and a profound sadness settled over him. He realized at that precise moment just how much he would miss his friend.
Legs giving way beneath him, Craig sat down hard on the floor, grateful for some reason for the pain that shot through his body as his butt landed on the ground.
Huell tried to lift him up by his arm. “Are you okay?”
And Craig started to cry.
FORTY TWO
Holding tightly on to Dylan’s hand, with his other arm around Angie’s waist, Craig stood in the parking lot with several of the programmers and others who had accompanied him to the seventh floor. He watched the police round up dazed rioters while firemen attempted to put out myriad blazes on the CompWare property and in the building. He felt drained and empty, sad and shell-shocked, but underneath all that was a deep abiding sense of relief. It was over. It may have ended badly, may have ended horribly, but it had ended, and that brought him a surprising measure of peace.
He looked up at the building, counting up to the seventh floor, and was gratified to see flames shooting out from shattered windows. He wished the consultant was up there, but he knew that wasn’t the case. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did, and his hope was that the firemen would put out the blaze quickly enough to preserve whatever the hell that floor had become. The second floor, too.
There might be enough evidence left for the authorities to go after the consultant or at least destroy the reputation of BFG.
Who was he kidding? The consultant would just change his name and the name of his firm.
He never had found out what the acronym BFG stood for, he realized.
If you don’t know that, you don’t know anything, the consultant had said.
What did that mean?
Craig didn’t know. He looked at the burning ruins of the CompWare campus, wondering if this could have been avoided, if there were something he could have done to prevent all of this death and destruction. A brown paper bag skittered along the ground, propelled by the breeze, two eyeholes cut in its face.
What had happened to the guards with the automatic weapons?
There were so many questions to which he didn’t know the answer, to which he might never know the answer.
He squeezed Dylan’s hand, held Angie tighter.
This was what was important. This was what mattered.
He saw Rusty being wheeled into the back of an ambulance. Phil was dead, Matthews was dead, Benjy and Cuong were dead, and so were God knew how many others. Those remaining were now jobless, every last one of them unemployed, though he couldn’t help thinking that they were better off unemployed than working for what CompWare had become.
He stared up at the night sky, the stars made invisible by the lights of the city and the illumination of the fires.
And the consultant? Craig wondered. Where was the consultant?
But he knew the answer to that one, didn’t he?
His eyes focused again on the burning seventh floor.
In a meeting.
The consultant was in a meeting.
He was always in a meeting.
Praise Ralph.
Cemetery Dance Publications
Be sure to visit CemeteryDance.com for more information about all of our great horror and suspense eBooks, along with our collectible signed Limited Edition hardcovers and our award-winning magazine.
Our authors include Stephen King, Bentley Little, Dean Koontz, Ray Bradbury, Peter Straub, William Peter Blatty, Justin Cronin, Frank Darabont, Mick Garris, Joe R. Lansdale, Norman Partridge, Richard Laymon, Michael Slade, Graham Masterton, Douglas Clegg, Jack Ketchum, William F. Nolan, Nancy A. Collins, Al Sarrantonio, John Skipp, and many others.
www.CemeteryDance.com
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty One
Twenty Two
Twenty Three
Twenty Four
Twenty Five
Twenty Six
Twenty Seven
Twenty Eight
Twenty Nine
Thirty One
Thirty Two
Thirty Three
Thirty Four
Thirty Five
Thirty Six
Thirty Seven
Thirty Eight
Thirty Nine
Forty
Forty One
Forty Two
Cemetery Dance Publications