One hand undid the button of his jeans and his fly with expert finesse while the other pulled the glasses from her face and let them drop to the floor. Before he could even think she pushed her lips into his, braces clacking against teeth, tongue pushed into his mouth like an angry serpent. He felt one leg wrap around his body, and the heat of her womanhood as it thrust against his open fly hungrily, and the gleeful moan that escaped her lips as she ground herself against the stone-hilted knife and mistook it for something else.
“W-What are you doing?” he stammered, as he pushed her away. She sprawled back onto the teacher’s desk, legs apart, and he fumbled his pants back up.
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” she pleaded, as she rushed for him again. “What you were hinting at. It’s okay, really! I’m not inexperienced, and I like older men. Let me show you. Please, let me show you.”
William turned away from her and marched out, feeling his stomach swirling and his heart jackhammering against his sternum. Behind him, he heard sniffling from the kindergarten room, but he kept his pace. He slipped past his daughter’s classroom, hoping upon hope that she wouldn’t notice him, and she didn’t. But that didn’t make him feel any better as he pushed open the front doors and staggered to his car. It wasn’t till he was halfway to his Volvo that he noticed his jeans were still unbuttoned, and he buttoned himself with a whimper just before he unlocked his car and slumped into the front seat.
“What the fuck are you doing?” he asked himself.
“You didn’t think that was a little cliché?” a voice asked from the back seat. “The pastor’s daughter?”
William didn’t need to glance into the rearview mirror to know who was taunting him. He let his head fall onto the steering wheel, and he grimaced. “She’s not pure. She’s not pure at all. I can’t believe this. I… I don’t even understand what happened.”
“What happened is that a horny teen girl just tried to seduce you,” the demon said, with a raspy laugh. “And frankly, your affairs of the flesh don’t concern me. You can walk right back in there and take her if it’ll make you feel better. Just get me my soul.”
William felt hot tears sliding down cheeks that were still flushed in embarrassment. “Why? Why can’t you just take some random soul? Why can’t I just give you some junkie homeless person on the street that no one’s going to miss? Isn’t that good enough for you?”
The demon chuckled beneath his breath. “So why didn’t you marry that drunk fat girl you slept with your sophomore year in college, that you vehemently denied ever being with? That wasn’t ‘good enough for you’?”
“That…” William sniffled, fired up his car. “How did you know that?”
“Oh, I know so much about you, William. More than you could fathom. And should I have a need to make you suffer, I will use all of it to crush you. There are so many ways to crush a man’s spirit, William. So, so many ways, and all of those lie within the human mind.”
“Can you read my thoughts?” William asked, hands clenched on the wheel, shaking.
“I have no need for that. I can’t hear your thoughts, or your pathetic prayers. You were praying, weren’t you, in that chapel? Alas, I can’t go in there with you, which is such a shame.” Though he couldn’t see it, though his face was still buried in the wheel, William felt the demon smiling at him. “I would have loved to hear your pathetic prayer. Your weak, rambling plea for a higher being to solve your problems. Well, I’m here, William. Look no further. Your prayer has been answered.”
William said nothing, only continued to sob into his steering wheel.
“You have five days,” the demon said, beneath the sickly yellow parking light of a church parking lot, and then he was gone.
*
When he finally folded into bed at the end of the night, William did not sleep. He stirred restlessly, laying on his back, eyes fixated on the dark crevices of the ceiling. At one point in the night Grace rolled over toward him, wrapped an arm around him, and asked softly, “Everything okay, honey?”
William hadn’t wanted to answer, but he felt compelled. “Do you think I’m doing the right thing?” he asked. “All of this—all I’ve done—will it make you and Dana and Lynette happy?”
“Your happiness makes us happy,” Grace replied. “The money’s a nice perk, but we just want you happy. Aren’t you happy?”
William pondered this. While he knew he wasn’t happy now, he felt like he could be happy. As if the past six months were one long walk through a darkened tunnel, and only now was he seeing the faintest of light awaiting him at the end. The only obstacle that stood in his way of happiness was his task.
“I am,” he said.
“And you’re doing a wonderful thing, William. Think how many jobs you saved by replacing Chris. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, isn’t that right? Isn’t that what you’d always told me?”
William ran that phrase through his head a few times and nodded. It was certainly true, now more than ever.
“You’re absolutely right,” he said. “Thanks, honey.”
With that his wife kissed him, and rolled back over onto her side. Moments later, William slept.
*
William pulled away from Dana’s school and found himself alone with a slew of fresh thoughts that bubbled over the brim of his brain. During his lunch break he had one hour in which to leave and carry out his task. Would he go to the nursing home and find a pure, elderly soul who was ready to go anyway? Would he go to the local hospital and take an infant, not yet developed enough to even understand what was happening to it? There seemed to be no clean way to carry out this task, but that did not deter William. He had figured a way to keep Cityscape afloat for nearly twenty years, and he planned to keep it afloat for many more. Hell, yesterday he’d found a way to bring back over half of the workers they’d had to lay off just a few months prior. There was surely a solution to this other problem, and William was certain he would find it.
As he pulled into his new parking spot, which was a hair closer, and started up to the front doors, he was stopped by a production worker. His face was familiar to William, though he had never spoken to the man before. He wasn’t sure why, not until the man grabbed William’s hands and opened his mouth.
“Mr. Willem,” the man said, in very, very broken English. “My name Godofredo, and you save many job. You save my job and you, uh, you save my family.” He squeezed down on William’s hands. “You very, very good man, okay?”
William gave Godofredo a smile, as he recalled him being one of the men Chris had laid off as a means to cover gambling expenses. He had never imagined, until this moment, just how much it meant to this man to have his job back.
“I’m happy to help you and your family,” William said. “You’re a good man, too, Godofredo.”
Godofredo gave William’s hands one more squeeze, and then he hurried forward to pull the door open for William.
“Thanks, Godofredo, and have a good day, alright?”
“Yes, Mr. Willem,” Godofredo said, as he made his way toward the assembly line, “today is good day.”
William sighed as he made his way to his office. Now, more than ever, he found himself determined to carry out the demon’s task—not just for his wife and his children, but for the workers that now depended upon him. For their wives, for their children. More families than his were at stake, he reasoned, and whoever ended up sacrificing themselves for him would be doing it for a great cause.
And yet that did little to settle his stomach as he brought his laptop out of hibernation and scanned over his e-mails. Many of them were ledgers and memos forwarded to him out of obligation. Some were suck-up e-mails from office workers wanting to welcome William to the position, nothing more than a way of reminding him that they existed. One was a tasteless forwarded joke from Steve called ‘The Nun and the Poodle.’ Then he saw an e-mail entitled ‘Follow Up,’ sent from Rebecca Anders, and he felt compelled to open it.
; Dear Mr. Bellows, it read, I just wanted to ensure that you had received my resume yesterday, and I also wanted to let you know just how enthusiastic I am about speaking to you regarding this position. Thank you in advance for your time.
Rebecca Anders. William remembered her. She was the one who did volunteer work at the hospital. She seemed like a nice young woman, and her credentials fit the bill for his old job. But more than that, maybe—just maybe—she was also of pure heart.
“Marissa,” William called out to the front desk, over intercom. “Would you bring in Ms. Rebecca Anders for an interview?”
*
The girl that walked into William’s office an hour later looked as if she’d just walked out of her second period math class and gotten lost. She was a bright-eyed, fresh faced young girl who couldn’t have been older than twenty-one, and the anxiety and the anticipation showed in her eyes. Her hand was sweaty as William shook it.
“Thank you for seeing me so quickly, Mr. Bellows,” she said, clasping her hands together eagerly. Her dark hair was up in a bun, and she was wearing a floral print blouse and a white skirt that dipped just below her knees. William noticed then that she was beautiful, but not in a sexual way. She radiated happiness, and honesty, and optimism that bordered on naivety. It felt as if he was standing in the presence of an angel.
“Have a seat,” he said. She did.
William cleared his throat. “So your resume says here you volunteer at the hospital?”
No sense in beating around the bush, William figured.
This caught Rebecca off guard. “Oh… uh, yes, I do. Two to three times a week. But it’s at night, so if I were considered for the position, there wouldn’t be any conflict of schedu—”
“And what do you do there?” William asked.
“I…” Rebecca shifted in her seat and gave a nervous laugh; she had not been expecting this line of questioning. “I just keep an eye on a certain wing of the hospital. Keep supplies stocked for doctors, keep the patients company, get them a nurse if they need help.”
William leaned back in his chair and nodded. “That’s wonderful, Rebecca. And who do you typically interact with?”
Rebecca cleared her throat, and this time when she spoke, she looked away from William. “I… uh, I don’t understand, Mr. Bellows. No disrespect intended, but we haven’t talked about accounting at all. I thought this was for an accounting job.”
“It is,” William said. “And you can count, and you can do math, and you know how numbers work, yes?”
“Well… yes.”
“Great.” William smiled. “So then who do you interact with at the hospital? Tell me about the patients.”
Rebecca shifted again in her seat, though this time she seemed to be losing her apprehension. “Well, there are some regulars, and there are always new people, too. I try to talk to all of them. To understand them. To… to I don’t know, make them feel like they’re cared for.”
“Do you care for them?” William asked.
Rebecca nodded, and as she said it, William could tell that what she was saying was truth. “I do.”
“Okay, so then—” But before he could ask another question, William was interrupted by his office door popping open. Steve Lopez bounded inside, wearing a toothy grin, but it sank quickly back into his goatee as he saw Rebecca squirming in her seat.
“Oh, shit, I’m sorry Bill,” Steve said, offering a consolatory wave. “I didn’t know you were busy. I’ll come back later.”
William brushed it off with a wave of his own hand. “It’s fine. I’m glad you’re here, Steve. I want you to meet our new accountant, Rebecca. My replacement.”
Rebecca’s eyes flared inside of her skull, and her eyebrows arched so high across her forehead that William thought they might get swallowed up into her hair. She said nothing, only turned to Steve as he approached her.
“Hey, welcome aboard!” Steve said, and gave her limp hand a strong shake. “You came to the right place! This guy here, he’s gonna take good care of you! He’s taking good care of all of us!”
“That’s… great,” Rebecca said, in a voice that was so low Steve could barely hear it. “It’s really… uh, nice to meet you, Steve.”
Steve offered another wave and closed the door behind him. No sooner had he gone than Rebecca clenched the sides of her chair and started scanning the corners of William’s gargantuan office with wide eyes.
“Okay, Mr. Bellows, this isn’t some kind of ‘you’re on hidden camera’ gag, is it? Because I really want this job. A lot. And I just—”
“No, no cameras,” William assured her. “The job is yours.”
Rebecca put a hand on the breast of her blouse. “Wait… really? Just like that? I… I really don’t understand.”
William smirked. “I know this is going to sound crazy, but I’ve been CEO of this company for one day. One whole day. Prior to that, this business was being run into the ground by a man that was treating this company—and all of its employees, including me—like garbage. Like we were disposable. I’m cleaning this company up, and I want good people with me. You seem like good people. Look, Rebecca, I can teach you how to do our accounting. That’s easy. But I can’t teach you how to be a good person. You still want the job, right?”
“Yes, and I really appreciate this,” Rebecca squeaked, as she straightened up in her chair. “You won’t regret this, Mr. Bellows. I’m going to do everything I can to ensure the quality and the integrity of our finances, and—”
“This comes with a condition, though.”
Rebecca’s smile dropped from her face. “Oh. What is it?”
“I want you to take me to your hospital. Show me where you volunteer. What you do.”
“Oh.” Rebecca blinked her eyes and looked away. “I can do that, I guess.”
“And I want to do that right now. I’ll drive us.”
Rebecca was taken aback by this. “Like right now?” The slightest bit of discomfort trickled onto her face, though she tried her best to hide it.
“Yes,” William said, wearing a crooked smile. “And don’t look at me like that, please. I promise you this isn’t some elaborate scheme to flirt with you or get you alone in some uncomfortable situation. I… pardon the expression, but I’ve been through some real shit lately, you know? I just need to see some good being done in the world.”
And though his motive went far beyond that, what he said was still true.
“Then let’s go,” she said. “This time of day, we can be there in ten minutes.”
*
The car ride across town was quiet but pleasant. Rebecca told William about her schooling and about her past accounting experience, which was next to nothing, and William told her about Miguel Rodriguez and his tyrannical son.
“And so now he’s rotting in prison,” William said, as the automatic doors opened with a ‘whish’ and the two walked inside St. John’s Medical Center. “It’s probably not very nice of me to say this, but I’m glad for it, too. He deserved it.”
Rebecca showed her volunteer badge to the front desk and proceeded down the next hallway with William following closely behind.
“It sounds like the company’s in much better hands, Mr. Bellows.”
“Please, call me Bill. Or hell, you can even call me Gingerbread Man if you want. Everyone else in the office does.”
They rounded a corner, into an adjacent hallway, and Rebecca glanced back at William in confusion. “Why do they call you that?”
William was already wearing a smile. “Because I’m a redhead and I used to hand out all of the ‘bread’.”
“Ginger… oh, I get it.” She stifled a laugh.
“You can laugh, you know. You have the job. I’m not just going to take it back from you.”
Rebecca wrinkled her brow. “If you don’t mind me saying, Mr. Bellows—err, Bill—this has been a very odd day. I can’t say I expected any of this to happen.”
“I didn’t either, Rebecca,” William said, as
he felt the weight of the stone-hilted knife in his waistline.
Heading toward a long row of rooms, Rebecca showed William the supply area, and introduced him to some of the staff in the waiting area. She then escorted him through various rooms. Rebecca was much more at ease in the north wing of the hospital, which she walked through freely and with confidence.
“This room belongs to Norman,” she explained, as she popped in and offered a wave to the old man lying in bed. He returned the wave with a smile. “He slipped and broke his hip last week. He won’t be here much longer, but I think he gets lonely, so sometimes I come in and just let him talk.”
“That’s nice of you,” William said. He felt the knife rub against his belt and winced.
“And this room belongs to Robert,” Rebecca went on, but this time without going in. “Who’s definitely a regular. He’s on life support. The doctors don’t think he’ll ever come out of it, but so far his family is keeping him plugged in because they think that one day he’s going to come back to us.”
“Do you think he’ll come out of it?” William asked.
“I think miracles happen all the time,” Rebecca replied. “But his family is very wealthy, and money isn’t an object. I just think they don’t want to say goodbye yet. Not until they’ve given that miracle a decent chance.”
They reached the room at the end of the hall. “And this is a new patient, Mary-Frances. She’s just lost a leg to diabetes, and she likes to practice using her crutches with me. We take walks up and down the hallway until she gets tired. Last week we made it all the way to the chapel.”
“There’s a chapel here?” William spun toward the other side of the hall. “Will you take me there?”
“Sure,” Rebecca said, and led him to the modest chapel that contained eight wooden pews on each side of the main aisle, leading up to a wooden altar and a cross nailed against a blue curtain. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“It is,” William said, and shifted nervously on his feet. “Hey, would you leave me be for a moment? I’ll grab you in a few minutes, I just… I just need a moment to myself.”
The Graveyard Shift Page 18