The Collection

by Bentley Little

  It was a hot time in the old office that day, but the party was cut short by Mike from Maintenance. He'd come up to install some coax cable, and when he saw that we were en­joying ourselves on company time, his face clouded over. He stood silently and whipped Kristen hard with a length of cable. She screamed as the connector end bit into the flabby flesh of her buttocks. A drop of blood flew into my highball, and Kristen fell from the desk, clutching her backside.

  I turned on Mike. "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

  He pointed a dark stubby finger in my face. I could see the grease under his fingernails. "This party was not ap­proved."

  "I approved it," I told him. "I'm head of the department."

  He grinned at me, but the corners of his mouth did not turn up and it looked more like a grimace. His greasy finger was still pointing at me. "We're taking you out," he said. "This is War."

  It started immediately.

  I'd expected some lag time, a reasonable number of days in which attempts could be made to talk, communicate, ne­gotiate. I'd assumed, at the very least, that Maintenance would need time to draw up plans, map out a strategy, but it was clear that they must have been contemplating this for a while.

  It began the morning after the party.

  The bathroom was booby-trapped and Carl got caught.

  I'd always allowed him a little leeway and so didn't im­mediately go looking for him when he did not return from lunch on time. But when an hour passed and Carl still had not shown, I became suspicious. Taking David with me, I ventured into the Hall. My eyes were drawn instantly to the crude white cross painted on the door of the men's room.

  And to Carl's head posted on the cleaning cart outside.

  David gasped, but I grabbed his arm and drew him for­ward. Carl's head was impaled on the handle of a mop. His eyes had been stapled shut, his mouth Scotch-taped, and Kleenex had been shoved into his ears.

  Maintenance.

  "Come on!" I quickly pulled David back into the safety of our department. I was worried but tried not to let it show. I had to maintain the illusion of confidence in order to keep up morale, but I realized that Maintenance was the only de­partment allowed unlimited access to every room in the building, the only department whose workers remained in the building at night. Their potential power was incredible.

  "What'll we do?" Meryl asked. She was scared, practi­cally shaking.

  "Stockpile the weapons," I told her. I turned to David and Feena. "Post a watch in the doorways. No one gets in or out without my okay. I don't care who they are."

  They nodded and hurried to carry out my orders, grateful that there was someone to take charge, someone to tell them what to do. I wished at that moment that there was a person to whom I could turn, a person higher up on the hierarchical ladder to whom I could pass the buck, but I had gotten us into this and it was up to me to get us out.

  I felt woefully unprepared for such a task. I had been able to plan and pull off the Accounting coup because I'd been dealing with the tunnel-visioned minds of task-oriented number crunchers, but going up against the freewheeling, physical men from Maintenance was quite another matter. These minds were not constrained by the limits of their job descriptions. These were people who were accustomed to working on their own, who were used to dealing with prob­lems individually.

  I shut the door, locked it, waited for five o'clock.

  In the Whorehouse, the women were getting restless. The number of work orders had dropped, and the lack of trade left them with no department accounts to which they could charge expenses. The women blamed the demise of Ac­counting for their falling fortunes, and tremors against my department and myself moved from the ground up, echoing through the chain of command. The Break Room was de­clared off-limits to us, its entrance guarded by Maintenance men. We could no longer leave our desks to go to the bath­room.

  This was Mike's doing.

  We found John in the Burster.

  Al in the Forms Decollator.

  I had not thought either machine capable of performing its function on anything other than paper, but at the foot of the Burster, in a pile that would have been neat were it not for the formlessness of tissue and the liquidity of blood, was the body of John, trimmed neatly and cut into legal-sized squares.

  Al's body had been divided into three layers and the parts lay separated in the metal rows designed for tripartite forms.

  The rollers were covered with red blood and flecks of white tissue.

  It was only the fourth day of hostilities and already we had lost two of our best men. I had not expected things to become so serious so quickly, and I knew that this mis­calculation might cost us our lives.

  I spent that morning's Break with Jerry and David. We were Breaking in teams now, going to the Break Room heavily armed. We sat down at a table, facing the door. All three of us knew that we had to hit back hard and fast, and at the very least make a statement with our actions, but we were uncertain as to how we should proceed. Jerry wanted to ambush a custodian, take him out. He thought we should amputate the arms, legs, and penis and send them back to Mike through the Vacuum Tubes or the Inter-Office Mail. David said we should sabotage the Coffee Machine, poison the backup Coffee Maker, and send a memo to all depart­ments except Maintenance to inform them of what was hap­pening.

  I thought we should strike at the head, assassinate Mike, and both of them quickly agreed that that would be best.

  We returned to our department, alert for snipers in the hall, but something did not seem quite right. I looked past Computer Operations and saw what looked like refracted light from around the corner of the hallway.

  From the battle site.

  I said nothing, simply pushed Jerry and David into our department and ordered them to close and lock the door. When the door was shut, I continued down the hall, creep­ing slowly across the carpet. I heard the sound of clicking calculators, the rustle of paper. I peeked my head around the corner.

  Maintenance had been promoted to Accounting.

  I stared at the suddenly full department in disbelief. We had brought down the entire Accounting department and had received nothing for our efforts. Maintenance booby-trapped the bathroom and two machines and had been re­warded with a promotion!

  Mike, wearing the Three-Piece Suit of the Finance Di­rector, grinned at me from his oversized desk. "See you in Chapter Eleven," he said.

  I blinked.

  "The company's going down."

  I tried to see the CEO, to tell him that things had gotten out of hand. The War was no longer confined merely to intra­mural battles; a single department was now aggressively pursuing and systematically working toward the total de­struction of the Corporation.

  But the secretary refused to hear my petition. She drew from her desk a flowchart of the Corporation hierarchy, cir­cled in red the position of my department, and calmly handed the paper to me.

  "The CEO sees nobody," she said.

  On the Dow, the news was mixed. There were rumors that changes were afoot, but the nature of those changes was clearly not known to Outsiders, and we ended the week in plus territory.

  Jerry took out a custodian masquerading as an account­ant, cutting off arms, legs, and genitals, tagging them as Fixed Assets and returning them to the Finance Director's office. I probably should have disciplined him for acting without my okay, but, in truth, I was grateful, and I pro­moted him to division supervisor.

  We hung the custodian/accountant scalp above the top of our door, and though it was gone in the morning, our point had been made. Mike knew we were a department to fear.

  That afternoon, miniature mines were placed under the carpet in the hallway and electrified gates were installed outside the Accounting offices.

  Figures were juggled.

  Budgets were slashed.

  The Corporation's profit margin plummeted, at least on paper, and though in memo after memo I tried to tell the CEO that those numbers were manufactured by Mike and not to
be trusted, he chose to ignore me and instituted a waist-tightening program. Medical benefits were cut, dental benefits eliminated, and several open positions were left un­filled.

  A new and virtually incomprehensible complaint process was instituted by Accounting, and immediately afterward paychecks—all paychecks, Corporation-wide—were incor­rectly calculated. My paycheck was halved, and under the new guidelines I could not contest the figures for a minimum of six months.

  At the bottom of my check, instead of the rubber-stamped signature of the old Finance Director, was a carica­tured rainbow-colored stamp of Mike's grinning, ugly face.

  I was furious, and I slammed my check down on my desk, ordered David to take a hostage. He nodded, said, "Yes sir," but wouldn't look at me, wouldn't meet my gaze.

  I knew he was hiding something. "David," I said.

  "Meryl's defected," he told me. "She's transferred over as a clerk."

  That was it. That was the last straw. I had taken an awful lot of crap from Mike and his Maintenance accountants, but this time he had gone too far. Ceasefire or no ceasefire, it was time to take up arms.

  "War!" I cried.

  David stared, blinked, then the corners of his mouth turned upward. He whooped joyfully, grabbed a sharpened pencil. "War!"

  The cry was taken up by Feena, Jerry, Kristen, the others. I felt good all of a sudden, the anger and depression of a few moments before having fled in the face of this energizing purpose. This was what we were good at. This was what we were trained for. Full-fledged fighting. Not the guerilla skir­mishing in which we'd been forced to participate.

  I lifted my ruler. "War!"

  "Huh!" they responded. "Good God, ya'll!"

  We were ready.

  We posted the declaration of renewed hostilities on the Employee Bulletin Board.

  Mike responded in kind with a statement signed in blood.

  We met in the Warehouse.

  The Maintenance men had heavier weapons—hammers and screwdrivers, wire cutters and soldering guns—but we had the brains, and at close quarters our weapons—scissors and staplers, X-Acto knives and paper clips—were just as deadly.

  It was a short war, and more one-sided than I would have expected. Mike planned an ambush, but the positioning of his men was obvious and uninspired, and it was easy for my people to sneak behind them and stab them with the scissors. We entered through the back, through the Loading Dock, and David took out two custodians, Jerry bringing down their heaviest hitter, the Electrician, slitting his throat with an X-Acto knife.

  And then it was me and Mike.

  We faced each other on the floor of the Warehouse. Rep­resentatives from other departments were in attendance, peeking from behind boxes, sitting on shelves. Mike had a hammer in one hand, pliers in the other, and he kept saying, "Fucker, fucker," growling it. He seemed stupid to me, then. Stupid and almost pathetic, and I wondered how I could have ever feared someone with such an obviously limited vocabulary.

  I grinned at him. "You're going down," I said.

  I shot him in the eye with a paper clip, quickly reloaded my rubber band, and shot his other eye. Both shots were true, and though he didn't drop the hammer or pliers, he was screaming, shielding his damaged eyes with his right arm. I had a metal ruler in my belt, and I pulled it out, moving in close. He heard me coming, swung at me, but he was blinded and running on panic, and I hit his cheek with the ruler, followed it with a flat-out smack to the nose. He dropped the pliers, swung futilely with the hammer, but he'd lost and he knew he'd lost, and to the cheers of my depart­ment I leaped upon him, tearing open his neck with my sta­ple remover, the metal fangs ripping out chunks of his flesh as he squealed in pain and rage and fear.

  And then it was over.

  There was silence for a moment, then pandemonium. From behind one of the boxes rushed the CEO's secretary, and she tried to hug me, but I pushed her away. "Remember your place in the hierarchy," I told her.

  We were carried back to our offices on the shoulders of Computer Operations and the dwarves.

  To celebrate our victory, we performed the Ritual. I or­dered a virgin from the steno pool, a high school grad who had been destined for the Whorehouse because of her poor shorthand skills, and we tied her down with rubber bands and laid her out on top of my desk. Feena rubber-cemented shut her eyes; I Wited-Out her nipples. We took turns with her.

  I shrunk Mike's head and kept it on my desk as a paper­weight, and when the stock market reached record levels, led by our corporation, I sent his head to the CEO through the Inter-Office Mail.

  This time, we got our notepads.

  Blood

  Before I moved in with my wife, I lived on macaroni and cheese. I spent so much time standing in front of my stove, stirring pots of boiling macaroni, that I used to stare down into the swirling, roiling water and imagine that I could see shapes in the foam the way some people see shapes in clouds.

  I decided to write a story about it.

  ***

  Alan stood and stretched as the whistle blew and halftime began. His gaze moved downward from the television to the clock on the VCR. Twelve forty. No wonder his stomach was growling.

  He walked into the kitchen, took a medium-sized glass pot from the drying rack next to the sink, filled it with water, sprinkled in some salt, placed the pot on the stove's front burner, and turned the gas to "High." Opening the cupboard, he drew out a package of macaroni and cheese. He pulled off the top of the box, took out the small foil packet of dried cheese, and dumped the macaroni into the water.

  It would be several minutes before the water started to boil, he knew. Not wanting to stand there in the kitchen, he returned to the living room and switched channels on the TV until he found another game. He watched it until a commercial came on, then went to the bathroom to wash his hands. When he returned to the kitchen to check on his lunch, small bubbles were starting to rise through the clear water from the hill of macaroni at the bottom of the pot. He quickly took a spoon from the drawer and began stirring, scraping. He didn't want the macaroni to stick to the bottom. It was hell to wash, almost impossible to get off.

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and looked down idly as he stirred. The water bubbled, a thin film of white foam seeping upward from the macaroni and whirlpooling into the center of the pot. The foam thickened, thinned, swirling about as he stirred, maintaining a roughly circular shape even as the metal spoon cut through its heart, sliced its edges.

  He stared at the water, fascinated both by the amazing mechanics of boiling and by the shifting patterns of the bub­bles and the film on top. The effect was kaleidoscopic, though the only colors he could see were the translucent brown of the Vision Ware, the pale wheat of the macaroni, and the pure white of the foam. He continued to look down as he stirred, imagining he could make out vague shapes in the boiling water, impressionistic outlines of elephants and birds and—

  a face.

  He peered closely at the contents of the pot, hardly be­lieving what he was seeing. He blinked. The features of the face, formed by clear spaces in the white foam circle, were somehow familiar to him though he could not immediately place their antecedent. As the water bubbled, individual pieces of macaroni rising to the top, the face seemed to move, eyes peering around, mouth opening and closing as if to speak.

  He stopped stirring for a second.

  The face smiled up at him.

  Alan stepped backward as a chill passed through him. He was suddenly aware of the dim emptiness of the kitchen, of the fact that he was alone in the apartment. Unreasonably frightened, he shut off the gas. The bubbles died down as the heat disappeared, the foam face dissipating, swirling out­ward in fading tendrils to reveal the cooked macaroni below.

  He was cold, but he was sweating, and he used a paper towel to wipe the sides of his face. His lips were dry, and he licked them, but his mouth had no saliva to spare. From the living room, he heard the roar of a football crowd. The noise sounded muffled, far off.r />
  He thought for some reason of his mother, of his sister. Strange. He had not thought of them in years.

  He looked down at the spoon shaking in his trembling hand. This was stupid. There was nothing to be afraid of. What the hell was wrong with him? Halftime would be over soon and the game would start again. He had to hurry up and finish lunch.

  He turned the gas on again and tried not to pay attention as the still hot water began almost instantly to bubble. But he could not help noticing with a shiver of fear that the foam was again beginning to swirl, again beginning to take on the features of a face: eyes, nose, mouth.

  He stirred. Quickly, harshly, rapidly. But the face re­mained intact.

  He pulled out the spoon, afraid now to touch the water even through this metal conduit, and began to back away.

  He heard a noise, a low whispery sound somewhere be­tween the quiet constant hissing of the gas flame and the percolating bubble of the boiling water. He had the distinct impression that the sound was a voice, a voice repeating a single word, but he could not make out what that word was. Summoning all of his courage, he looked into the pot.

  The foam mouth closed, then opened, then closed, and seeing this movement timed with the whispering sound, he knew what word was being spoken.

  "Blood," the face said. "Blood."

  Blood.

  What could that mean? He had spent all afternoon think­ing about it. More than anything else, the word had sounded to him like a command, an order.

  A request for sustenance.

  But that was crazy. A random pattern formed by boiling macaroni was demanding blood? If he had read this in a story, he would have dismissed it as laughably implausible. If he had heard someone else mention it, he would have con­sidered that person a candidate for the rubber room. But he was sitting here thinking about it, had been doing so for hours, and the scary part was that he was actually trying to logically, rationally, analyze the situation.

  But that wasn't really the scary part, was it?