by Nina Post
She took some papers from her bag. “I have an employment contract, signed by you. It says that Murray, the employee―and here’s an attached head shot of you―‘will release, indemnify and hold harmless the employer, his supervisors and co-workers from any liability arising from employee’s actions in the performance of his job, regardless of whether said actions were requested specifically by the employer.’”
The crowd of residents, both in the studio and watching in the reception area, listened attentively as she piled on the accusations. A few of them hissed and booed at Murray. Tom the water scorpion brought up his ukulele to play a quick instrumental song for the onlookers, while an Enim giant tapped pensively on a bowl containing a fighting fish.
“‘These actions,” she continued, “include: locating and eliminating all members of the Driscoll family, viz. Anne Driscoll, daughter Kelly Driscoll, and Anne Driscoll’s work associates; sabotaging the manufacturing and distribution of Cluck Snack products; kidnapping, starving, or otherwise eradicating all single-purpose angels in Pothole City; golf caddying; plant watering; technical support; and Pothole City tax auction attendance in my stead.’”
The residents looked at one another and murmured. Murray wiped the sweat off his forehead with his sleeve then locked his hands together in his lap.
“‘Pursuant to this contract,” she continued, “you certify, as the employee, that you will not hold anyone else liable for any harm resulting from the performance of your duties, i.e., the immolation of the Driscoll cabin at the end of Rural Route 3 in the Allegheny Forest and the confirmed death of all residents.’”
Roger recoiled, eyes wide, and shook his head at Murray.
Kelly held the contract at the top and showed it to Murray. “The contract is notarized in blood with a paw print. Apparently your ferret”―Kelly raised a hand―“Excuse me: former ferret, Stringfellow Hawk―is also a notary public. I compared the prints.”
“That doesn’t necessarily incriminate me.” Murray rubbed his nose. “I could have passed the job to a colleague. There’s nothing to prove I actually did it myself.”
Roger leaned forward. “It kinda does incriminate you, Murray.”
“I also have”―she pulled out more papers from her bag―“a reimbursement form for a rental car and two nights in the Allegheny Forest Furry Friends Lodge that correspond to the dates of my mother’s death.
“Additionally, I have an Employee of the Month award for you, signed by Don. There’s also a photo of you and the telepresence robot, and a handwritten note that reads ‘Murray, thanks for your great work on the Driscoll job, sincerely Don.’“
Murray scratched his head. “We might have had other work to do there. Natural gas drilling. Taxidermy. Meat curing.”
She pulled out a glossy 8x10 photo. “Here is a photo of you, posing with a whitetail buck you killed―accidentally, I want to point out―with our cabin on fire in the background.” She pointed. “There.”
Roger took the photo from her, glanced at it, then gave Murray a look of disappointment.
“Where did you get this?” Murray’s face reddened.
“Don’s hell lodge. And finally, I have something I found in your apartment.” She rolled the pellet between two fingertips.
Murray gaped. “What―How―Where did you get that?”
Kelly smirked. “Your notary public.”
“Murray,” Roger asked, with the serious tone of Charlie Rose interviewing a high-profile dictator, “Kelly mentioned you killed one of your own, too. How did you manage that?”
“Mikriel,” she said. “His favorite food was Cluck Snack Sweet n’ Savory Breakfast Syrup.”
Murray looked at the residents, pressing their faces against the studio window.
He stared at his shiny oxfords.
“Grace Zabriskie Sings the Ferret Hits,” he said after a protracted silence.
She came to a horrified realization. “All those record albums.”
Murray nodded. “There’s a hidden track at the end of the record. Only one of them was ever produced that way. I bought as many as I could find over the years. Hundreds of them.” He met Roger’s eyes as though unable to look away. “Until I found it.”
Roger gestured at him to continue.
“I invited Mikriel over to my loft to fix my record player.”
She rested her elbows on her knees and covered her face with her hands.
“Why Mikriel?” Roger asked.
“He’s―he was in charge of audio equipment,” Murray said. “He came over. I played the record. He leaned in with his stethoscope. Then the hidden track played, at 179,000 Hz. Mikriel started to vibrate, and then―he dissolved.”
Kelly got up and paced around the studio, hand over her mouth.
“I felt terrible.” Murray stood. “I haven’t been able to sleep. I’ve lost my appetite. My work performance has degraded. I lost three traders.”
She lunged at Murray. He tried to run out of the studio, but an impassable and encroaching wall of bound angels, interdimensional monsters, and a giantpicked him up and took him down the hall.
Roger sighed and tilted his head at the reception office. “They’ll take care of Murray. Don’t worry―I’ve trained them to maim, not kill.”
Roger turned to the camera with a wide smile. “And that’s our show. Tune in next week for our special guest, a resident of the twenty-first floor and the person responsible for his company’s edible decorations. Please join us again.”
Roger handed the microphone to his assistant. “And that’s a wrap. Kelly, thanks for being on the show. I hope you get the revenge you deserve.”
“Thanks, Roger.”
oger, I need to use your computer.”
Kelly went with Roger from the studio into his office.
“Do you need to check your email? Isn’t that what the business center is for?”
“I have to use your specialized software.”
“Here, I’ll log in for you.”
“No need.” She quickly typed in the username and password.
“What the hell?” Roger put his hands on his hips.
“I might have been here before. And it really wasn’t hard to figure out.” She opened a software application called AngelRoute Pro, went to the toolbar, and chose ‘View History’ from the menu.
“Don hates to work,” she said. “Normally, someone in his position would be in charge of assigning bound angels to their respective prisons. But in order to route hundreds of bound angels to different prisons, you have to fill out a lot of paperwork. When I saw how much dust was covering the piles on Don’s desk, I realized what he had done.”
She typed for a moment, focusing on the screen.
“The way Don arranged it, instead of having to fill out hundreds of individual forms, and setting the route for each individual prison, there would be just one form for all bound angels.”
“A route that led to my building,” Roger said.
“Yep.” She stared intently at the screen. A moment later, she said, “This part is…” her brow tightened with a vertical furrow. “Delicate.”
She cross-checked the routes to the building with the list she made from the paperwork. “Here’s the problem.”
“There’s a problem?” Roger put his hands on the desk.
“Ideally, the modifications I’m making will reassign any angels who have not already been routed to the building, so new ones won’t keep getting routed here. But there is a risk that all current Amenity Tower angels will be reassigned, even if I don’t specifically reassign them. This is tricky software―I’ve been reading the manual and it may as well be written in Sumerian.”
Roger flashed a conciliatory smile. “I never needed to use it. The program was just there, like that Minesweeper game. I tried using it once or twice but could never get past the first level.”
She moved the cursor from one side of the screen to the other, pausing after each motion to double-check her work.
“
So.” Roger looked over her shoulder. “No more angels would be bound here.”
“That’s right. No new ones.”
He flashed an amused half-smile. “You’re going to send them all to Murray’s office, aren’t you?”
“Yep. Bound angels who aren’t here already, and the hitchhiking interdimensional monsters that follow them, should start arriving at Murray’s office presently.”
It was a small action, but one that would cause mind-blowing amounts of inconvenience for Murray. Maybe she would have time to do more later.
Roger exhaled, stretched, and cracked his neck. He went and sat in the corner chair by the rubber tree and under a motivational poster for ‘Planning.’
She tilted an Amenity Tower floaty pen. “As for the monsters destroying what’s left of the city, I’ll have to think up a different solution, since your copy of AngelRoute Pro doesn’t include the Interdimensional Monster Add-On Pack. Ha.”
Roger clapped his hands once and kept them together. “Fair enough. But why not route them to Murray’s apartment, instead of his office?”
“He’ll be spending much more time in the office.”
“It’s just too bad we can’t see it,” Roger replied.
Her smile curved up one side as she tapped on the keyboard and cocked her head to get him to come over to the desk. “But we can. First, though, I’m really craving a coffee and a rhubarb pie.”
Kelly left Roger’s office and headed to the automat where she lucked out: two slices of the rhubarb sat in the same space behind the door, and the stick-monster working the counter gave her the second slice for free.
She reconvened with Roger at his desk, where she tossed him a wrapped slice of pie, keeping one for herself.
“The suspense is killing me.” Roger attacked the pie. “Do you have a secret camera hidden away at Murray’s office?”
“Do you host a show? Two cameras inside, two outside.”
They watched the black and white feed. Murray, already hobbled from the beating he took earlier, perused Don’s paperwork.
A light flashed in the center of the room and Murray jerked his head up. A giant angel with hundreds of eyes in the shape of a wheel appeared.
The many-eyed angel looked everywhere at once, turning to one side then another. When it spoke, it sounded like a mountain decided he had something to say. “Is this Sheol? Perdition? The Gates of Death? The Gates of the Shadow of Death? Silence? The Bilge? The Lowest Pit?”
“It’s my office,” Murray said, standing.
“I am to be bound here for seventy generations,” the angel said in a deep grumbling rasp. “Where is your bathroom?”
Murray sat with a resigned thud. “There’s only one bathroom. Down the hall.”
In the management office, she rubbed her hands together in glee. She couldn’t even remember feeling this jubilant before.
Roger stepped back from the screen. “You ported all incoming monsters and bound angels to Murray’s office―but can’t he just leave?”
She beamed. “No. I bound him there, too.”
elly left Roger’s office and pressed the elevator button for the top floor.
Tom the giant water scorpion bowed slightly and smiled. “Manicure? Latte? Shoulder massage?”
She smiled back. “No thanks, Tom. I’m good.”
The elevator cab stopped on the next floor and the Jackal stepped in, wearing swim shorts, a towel around his neck, and holding a burning bush. Tom pressed the button for forty-eight.
The Jackal glanced over at the bush. “Why are you in a poopy mood?”
“I’m not in a poopy mood.” The bush flamed a few inches higher.
“You’re going to have to get your poop shields on,” the Jackal said to Kelly behind his paw.
“Don’t say things like that in front of other people,” the bush said, blazing a stronger reddish hue.
“Weekend guest,” the Jackal said, rolling his eyes.
The elevator stopped at forty-eight. “Have a nice day,” he added, stepping out of the cab.
When the elevator reached the top floor, she sprinted up the stairs to the roof, where the air felt crisp and cold, and the sky glowed with a menacing purple hue.
There was also nothing left of Pothole City as far as she could see.
The building where she lived, the former headquarters of Special Situations International, was still intact. But beyond Amenity Tower and the SSI building, Pothole City was nothing but razed earth, rubble, and flying monsters circling overhead.
“It’s just one big pothole,” she said into the wind.
Right above her, the sky cracked and blackened in a fissure and she stepped back. A pair of muscular brick-red arms with glossy black claws gripped the edges of the fissure. Af jumped out and landed on the roof, glossy black wings unfurling, muscles flexing.
She turned her back to him and walked to the edge of the roof, putting a boot up on the embedded bolt where she had secured her window washing ropes. “I’m disappointed that you haven’t changed back yet.”
“The Af you knew was trapped, weak. A moth flapping its insubstantial wings against the glass.”
She scoffed. “More like a moth riding the elliptical, reading Lodge & Camp, and buying applesauce cake from the building’s automat. More accurate, less poetic.”
Af cleared his throat and pressed on. “Imprisoned, and sentenced to attend board and committee meetings.”
“Brutal.”
“Those things can go on for hours,” he said in protest. “You wouldn’t believe how much time they spend on the most inconsequential thing. And there’s always a guy who asks questions about every single item on the agenda. I’d like to see you handle it. Not well, I’d imagine.”
His voice in this form took some getting used to.
She pushed at her bag with her toe. “If you ever see me at one of those meetings, feel free to chloroform me.” She pushed off the rail and came closer to him. “What are you doing? Didn’t you kind of like this whole almost-human thing?”
Af cocked his head and gave her a sidelong glance. “Do you remember what you said to me the day we met? It wasn’t exactly a rousing endorsement for Pater’s ‘splendour and brevity’ of the human condition.”
“I was much younger then.”
“That was the other day,” Af said.
“Maybe I would change the tone of it now.”
He smiled. “It was the SPs, wasn’t it? They got to you.”
“They’re fine. Stop making this about me. You were the one who had the tantrum.”
He held up his palms. “It’s just what I do. If I were an angel of accounting, then I would go fill in a ledger. If I were an angel of aquaculture, I would build an artificial swamp habitat.”
“If that’s the case, why not go all the way? The only destroying you did was accidental.”
“Because you could have been anywhere.” Af spread out his arms to indicate a swath of space. “You were in and out of all of those alleys. Did you want me to do more? I made sure that your building” ―he gestured to the Special Situations HQ―“and Amenity Tower went unscathed.”
He tilted his head at the city below them. “Also, you’re giving me way too much credit. Those monsters that flew in from the interdimensional portals did most of the damage. I was just enjoying my true form. What does it matter to you, anyway?” he asked.
“It does matter.”
He flapped a wing back and forth. “It matters to you that I go back to my human form?”
“Yes. But there is a small chance you could be rerouted.”
“What? I can’t be rerouted!”
“The interdimensional monsters that got in through the air handler are putting an angel of destruction to shame.” She gestured at the chaos below. “They’re flying or taking the trains out of the city to destroy everything else. And all you care about is staying in Amenity Tower?”
“I don’t want to be transferred to a bottle of gin or a mastodon skeleton
or a deep fat fryer for a thousand years. Not again. Not after meeting you.”
“I’m almost certain you won’t be rerouted,” she said, feeling oddly happy and not quite recognizing it.
Af gouged a line in the roof with the tip of a claw. “I’ll be sure to send you postcards from the tumbleweed I get assigned to.” He braced his arms and closed his eyes.
“Hey. Why don’t you change into something more comfortable, like your human vessel. We’ll stop the prince of evil from leaving in the dumpster. We’ll get that air handler closed and stop any more of those monsters from getting in. And we can find the SPs then get some peanut butter sandwiches on raisin bread at the automat. Sound good?”
Af smiled.
The door back into the building slammed shut. Roger strode toward them, shiny red tie flapping in the breeze. He stopped in front of Kelly, brushed dust off his black suit, and cast a look of moderate surprise at Af.
“My promotion to Regional Manager will be official in―” Roger checked his Databank watch. “Right about now. It’s been a pleasure knowing both of you. Best of luck in your future endeavors.”
“What about What’s On Your Mind, With Roger Balbi?” Af asked.
“The show was my test of worthiness,” Roger said. “The property management corporation I work for doesn’t give Regional Manager to just anyone. This took a hell of a lot of planning. The crap I put up with managing this place would make you shudder, so I’m relieved to move on. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I think it’s starting.”
Roger stood still, hands loose at his sides, eyes closed. A moment later, his body shuddered and cracked open and expanded up and out.
“Huh. What do you think that is?” Kelly asked as they watched Roger’s transformation.
“Hard to tell,” Af said. “A tegu? A pterosaur?” He craned his neck to the side with a quizzical squint.
Roger’s body expanded rapidly. Sharp spikes protruded from his back and he howled with the pain and effort of it.
“It’s hard to get used to,” she said. “He’s always been so thin. How much do you think he weighs now?”