by Nick Cole
Ritter listened for a while. Listened to the two of them, Dante and Skully, saying nothing to each other. He knew they couldn’t stop watching. He’d felt that way too, at first. The first time he’d seen them.
The zekes.
Candace came in and sat across from him in one of the other Restoration Hardware overstuffed cigar leather chairs that made up the expensively decorated reception area. Her makeup had been reapplied. She’d done the best she could for someone who’d been living in the same clothes for a week now. At least there was a shower in Dave’s executive office.
A week ago, there had been thirty employees working for Green Front Technologies, now there was just Candace and Dante. Skully had just happened by when it all went down. Someone’s lunch order. Ritter had come to pick up something from Big Dave, but once it all went south, Big Dave had held on to the package, a bargaining chip in case Ritter got rescued. Big Dave wanted in if that happened.
“We need a plan… a way out,” Candace said tiredly. Like she’d been trained to do in some weekend seminar on business leadership at the Ramada out by the airport. Something like… Executive Leadership in Crisis Situations Success Skills Seminar, or so Ritter guessed.
Something like that.
Ritter knew a way out, he just needed them to figure it out.
He threw up his hands weakly.
“Yo no se, mi amiga. I just got caught here.”
That was the cover, and Ritter had been working it. When everything started going down that morning a week ago, when he knew the infection had reached the U.S., he didn’t even bother to check out of his hotel down at the beach. He’d taken an overnight bag, still out there in the Lexus, and driven up to Green Front for the pick up. By then it had been too late. He had been too late. The virus or whatever the hell it really was, was already massively out of control. The roads leading to Green Front’s doorstep, the twelve miles between the ludicrously luxurious Montage Resort in Laguna Beach, and Green Front up in Viejo Verde, had been a traffic nightmare rapidly turning into a global pandemic freak out.
Traffic accidents.
Fights in the middle of the street that weren’t really fights. People just assumed it was two men fighting. Or a group of people beating the hell out of someone. People just didn’t want to see all the blood.
Then the cops had gotten involved and snarled everything.
He’d crawled into Viejo Verde late that first night.
The zombies were already out.
They’d been gathering in the industrial business complex and Ritter thought he’d have enough time to get into Green Front, lay a trip on Dave, and pick up the package.
But Dave was in full General mode. He’d organized a defense of the lobby. Barricades on the first floor that came down two days later under the sheer weight of the massive zombie onslaught. Zombies that had been drawn by Dave’s high-powered Ruger hunting rifle as he fired at them from the roof.
Like he was going to scare them off.
He’d only had two boxes of shells.
Each one he’d taken out, and there hadn’t been many ‘cause headshots are hard, “cuz”, lamented Ritter of Dave’s poor targeting ability, had drawn ten more. Maybe a hundred more.
Ritter had suggested in the following days that they just lay low. He knew something they hadn’t figured out yet. He knew the zombies would lose interest if something better came along. But in the days that followed, two things happened. One, someone always managed to remind the zombies they were still up there, still inside the building.
Hysterical claustrophobia-induced screaming.
One guy got stir crazy and ran down the main lobby stairs like he was a running back. Like he was OJ or something. Dante coulda told him he wasn’t low enough to the ground. He made it to the bottom of the stairs. Then they watched on Dave’s secretary’s closed circuit app at her workstation what happened next. Well, most of them watched for as long as they could stomach it.
Ritter didn’t. He’d seen that happen ad nauseam.
And the second thing that happened, was that nothing better came along. So the hundreds of zombies, zekes Ritter liked to call them, the hundreds of zekes just kept milling around, convinced there was more to be had inside the building. And they were right. After the first floor debacle of General Dave’s great lobby defense, there’d been fifteen. After the running back, fourteen. After the two suicides, twelve. After the breakout at the back of the building, there’d been five. Maybe some of the seven who’d tried to make a run for it in every direction had made it. But most hadn’t, and Ritter suspected none of them actually did.
See, their plan was just to run once there was an opening. That was stupid, thought Ritter.
Run where, exactly?
You can run, but you’ll just die tired. A spook sniper had told Ritter that, once. It seemed an apropos epitaph to Ritter, for the seven that had died trying.
Then there were just five.
Dave had started to freak out at that point, and convinced everyone to attract the zombies to the backside of the building so he could take off and “go get help”. Everybody thought it was a great plan only because it was a plan and there weren’t really any plans left. Ritter had even told Dave to take his ride. Handed him the keys and everything. Told him it was all filled up. It wasn’t, and the keys were to some other car. Even had Toyota printed on them.
Chump didn’t even bother to check, thought Ritter. Didn’t even bother to check because he was so excited he was going to get to sleaze his way out of another situation gone south and leave everybody to pay the bar tab. Classic Dave.
But Dave was out of the way now.
Dave’s gone, man.
Ritter chuckled.
Now Ritter could search his office. Or more importantly, search the safe room Dave hadn’t told anyone about. Except maybe Candace. Ritter bet the package was inside the safe room. Had to be, straight up.
“There isn’t any food left,” said Candace.
She rubbed her forehead with her thumb and forefinger. She was older, late thirties. She was pretty. She could have gotten by on her looks, but she didn’t, unless she was forced to. Ritter could tell. It was hard, when you were pretty, to stop gettin’ by on pretty. Y’know, like once you start, it’s hard to stop, girl.
Ritter smiled wanly at her.
“Have we searched everywhere?” he asked, throwing it away even as he said it. Giving her the impression he was just going through the motions.
She hesitated.
Then…
“Yes. Everything… I mean everywhere.”
Ritter opened his eyes, staring at her. His look said, really?
“What?” asked Candace.
“I don’t know,” Ritter said and leaned back. He tilted his head against the creamy coolness of the expensive leather chair. He closed his eyes.
Quiet.
It was already getting hot outside. The building’s AC had kicked on, but it would only move warm air around because it was green compliant. By the middle of the day, it would be hot again. Not a good thing with a week’s worth of dead bodies surrounding the place.
The green-friendly AC hummed into existence, vibrating the building and barely stirring the stale office air.
“It seemed like, when I asked you just now,” began Ritter, “like you weren’t absolutely sure we’d searched everywhere.” Emphasis on the word ‘everywhere.’
Candace closed her eyes. Ritter watched her forehead doing the math. The math that added up Dave’s death and subtracted him from her decision making tree. Subtracted him from making good on all those promises he’d promised. Loyalty for sex. Advancement for lies told on his behalf. A raise for missing monies unnoticed. Whatever.
She opened her eyes and said, “There is one more place we can search now.”
Chapter Twenty Five
&nb
sp; Candace led Ritter into Dave’s private office.
Dave also has, had, Ritter corrected himself, a public office. Really, it was just an over-sized private conference room where all attention was to be focused on Dave as he met with investors and government types who could make sure he got a place at the stimulus table. He’d even had a special track light installed to illuminate his face perfectly. A spotlight. Candace remembered he’d taken the better part of that work day just to get the lighting perfect for the effect he’d wanted.
An innocuous door lay beyond, behind Dave’s “throne”. “Throne” being an off-hand joke Dave had once started on purpose at the end of a meeting. Candace related the story as they passed by. A joke Ritter quickly identified as not really being a joke at all, as Candace gave the expensive state-of-the-art office chair a spin.
Candace pulled out her keycard and held it tightly between her manicured thumb and forefinger for a moment. Her jaw was set, lips pursed.
“C’mon Candy, he ain’t coming back,” Ritter said drily from behind her.
Candace finished some internal argument and nodded to herself. “No, I guess he isn’t.”
She slid her key card through the slot in the security lock, and they entered Dave’s private suite. It was a clear homage to the masculine art of hunting. It was everything opposite of the public image of Green Front Technologies and its upbeat Save-the-Planet agenda. Green Front Technologies had been a green economy start-up captained by Dave “Big Dave” Ratkowski, former owner of a failing car dealership franchise down in San Diego. The dealership had gone belly up after the sports figure who fronted the operation spent all his money on court-ordered child support for his baby mamas and the brand new car-a-week habit he’d acquired in the league, which didn’t pair too well with his reduced, now-retired, income. Green Front had been an enthusiastic player in the early gold rush of marrying state of the art green jobs with newly-trained technicians in the flagging economy. Wind Turbine Techs. Solar Panel Techs. Electric Car Battery Techs. All the “techs” one might ever need for the promised Green Economy Boom that was sure to arrive any day. Dave and Co. were ready to fill the ranks of all those promised jobs.
Except the boom never happened. But that didn’t matter, because there was lots and lots of stimulus flooding forth from the green energy true believers in government. Dave was a master at making sure Green Front had a healthy infusion, from time to time, of tax-payer supplied government pork. So, Dave did a lot of hunting trips with state legislators far and wide to make sure those representatives of democracy were having all the fun they could handle. Thus, the money kept rolling in so the world could be saved from the evils of whatever the New York Times was labeling capitalism’s next great evil.
Dave had used the word “Global” a lot.
He even had a big globe he’d unconsciously nod at every time he said the word in some meeting held in the conference room. There was a small bar inside the globe. All you had to do was lift the world by its equator, and there was the top shelf scotch, Dave’s fave, and a few cut crystal bucket glasses, all nestled snuggly in blue velvet.
Class.
The inner office looked like an advertising executive’s concept of a well-appointed library of some Supreme Court Justice back in the 1950’s. There were dark book shelves carved from oak. Comfy leather chairs that made the very nice ones in the lobby seem cheap and somehow discount. The massive desk wasn’t really a desk. It was a campaign table that Dave had picked up for a mere $25,000 from a Sotheby’s auction. It had belonged to some English General back in World War II. There were several stuffed big game heads, all of which Dave had proudly shot while in the company of various senators and congressmen, both state and federal, from either side of the aisle, as they discussed how Dave might play a bigger role in the coming global effort to save the planet from mankind. There was even a well-polished, shiny but with depth and layers revealed in the richness of the wood, teak gun rack where Dave’s very high-powered, scoped big game rifle had once rested. That very expensive weapon was most likely now down in the zombie-infested stairwell. Ritter guessed Dave had probably used it as a club in those final few seconds when he realized he wasn’t going to get bailed out of this one. But that didn’t matter, it had been out of bullets since Dave’s rooftop mission to “clear the perimeter”.
Maybe that was why Dave hadn’t been able to pull off any headshots on the advancing horde of undead on that particular mission, thought Candace to herself in a rare moment of cold appraisal of the once dynamic Dave. You didn’t shoot big game in the head, see, because you wanted the heads for later. So you could put them on your wall. You shot them in the heart and lungs. Things zombies didn’t require anymore.
“Me big hunter,” joked Ritter as he reached up and touched the horns of an African gazelle.
Candace turned and rolled her eyes.
And yes, believe it or not, there was a hidden passage behind one of the book shelves. When Candace pulled a book away from its place on the shelf, Heart of Darkness, observed Ritter and noted the near-perfect irony, the book case swung outward without sound. Beyond lay Dave’s panic room.
Candace slid her card into another small security lock to one side of the steel reinforced door, and watched as a small LED turned green. Then she turned the polished steel handle and opened the door. Inside they found a wide leather couch, designer oak cabinetry with locks, and a computer. Ritter went to the computer immediately. He could feel Candace’s tension as he squeezed by her. Like she still wasn’t completely on board with the whole “rifling through her dead boss’s office” plan.
She hasn’t come to terms with this yet, thought Ritter. She doesn’t realize this is the way the world is now. She still thinks everything might turn out alright. Like maybe this will blow over by the weekend and we’ll all be back to work Monday next.
Well, girlfriend… ain’t gonna happen.
“I guess we should search these cabinets,” she said nervously. “But I don’t have the keys… oh… you don’t think they’re still in his pocket…”
“No, they’re not.” Ritter said as he tapped the keyboard. It seemed to be solely dedicated to spyware that monitored a security feed on several hidden cameras. Most of the employees had no idea Dave was watching them. “There’s a key ring near the door,” said Ritter.
“Oh,” said Candace to herself in the thick silence of the tiny room. Ritter waited until she’d gotten the first cabinet open. Down on all fours, she started to call out the inventory she’d found. When Ritter was sure she was engrossed in the busy work he’d left her no choice but to engage in, he chanced a quick look around. The sides of the couch. In back of it. Under the desk. Quick, casual, but still thorough.
No package.
“Sales trophies in this one,” shouted Candace, her head buried in a cabinet near the floor.
“Files in this one,” from another.
“We can’t eat those, Candy,” said Ritter, hoping to make her think this whole expedition was merely about food and survival.
“Don’t ever call me that again.” Her voice was muffled by the deep interior of the next cabinet.
Then she erupted in a sudden gush of excitement. “Get out!” she demanded. “Get out of here!” she repeated again.
“What is it, Candy?”
“There’s money! Stacks and stacks of it.”
“Unless it’s chocolate gold coins like the kind you got from your “moms” at Christmas, it’s no good to us now.”
Guy like Dave, thought Ritter, I’da been surprised if we hadn’t found money.
“Here’s a briefcase, but it’s locked. Here, you try it. See if you can break the lock or something.” She pushed it out behind her. Ritter saw it and knew he’d found the package he’d initially come to Green Front for in the first place.
TARRAGON, in neat gold letters, lay stamped above the lock.
&n
bsp; “You know if Dave had a favorite code word… or number maybe even?” Ritter asked, going through the motions. As if he’d actually even try and open it now.
“Try 007. He used that one a lot,” said Candace from inside the cabinet
Ritter waited while he did nothing. “Nah, don’t work.”
Candace backed out of the second to last cabinet. Her hair was disheveled. She blew a dark lock from across her forehead. Again, Ritter was reminded that she was actually very pretty.
Girl coulda made a nice cougar in a few years if she’d married rich, he told himself.
In the last cabinet they found pop tarts, a bottle of scotch and a six pack of bottled soda water.
“Some panic room,” mumbled Ritter. “I guess he thought he wouldn’t need to be in there for more than a few hours.”
“Dave…” Candace sighed, putting her hands on her hips. “Dave just wasn’t very smart. He was good at talking, but… he wasn’t all that smart. What do you suppose is in that thing?” she said, motioning toward the briefcase Ritter was holding.
“He was smart enough to hire you,” said Ritter, fixing her with his most intense of casual stares from beneath lowered eyelids. A move he practiced often. He called it the “Switched-On Brother look”.
Before she could restrain herself, she smiled. When she realized she had done so, she looked away.
Ritter thought he’d almost distracted her enough to get her to lay off the briefcase. To forget about it. But he knew she wasn’t that dumb. He knew she was greedy. That’s how she’d made it as far as she did.
“Money, I bet,” she said with a sigh of disgust that barely masked what she really felt. “Or maybe jewelry… or even gold. Things we can’t eat, right?” She stared at it as she talked and Ritter could see she was somewhere else.