2ND SIGHT
Capturing Insight
By Ben Sharpton
2ND SIGHT
Copyright © 2016 by Ben Sharpton.
All rights reserved.
First Print Edition: June 2016
Limitless Publishing, LLC
Kailua, HI 96734
www.limitlesspublishing.com
Formatting: Limitless Publishing
ISBN-13: 978-1-68058-678-7
ISBN-10: 1-68058-678-5
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.
Dedication
To Nikki and Jonny
Embrace Your Dreams
Understand Through insight
Lead With Vision And Compassion
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
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“Your old men will dream dreams, and your young men will see visions.”
—Ancient Prophesy
CHAPTER ONE
The body was heavy.
He dragged the corpse through the kitchen and into the attached garage. Sweat poured from his balding forehead down to his glistening nose where wire frame glasses threatened to slide down to his steely goatee. He paused to push the glasses up higher on his nose, only to have them slide down again.
The legs of the body bounced three times down the garage steps and then slid across the cement floor with a swoosh as the man dragged it to the rear of the car. He dropped the shoulders, which bounced along with the bloody head, on the floor. Sticking his hand into his pocket, he found the key fob and pressed the tiny button to unlock the trunk. Sucking in a lung-full of fresh air, he hefted the body, first the upper torso and then the legs, and rolled them all into the trunk. Blood oozed from the head onto the carpet. He’d have to clean it up and then trade the car for a new one to hide any evidence of his presence. Fake IDs would add another layer of anonymity between him and the body, now crumpled into somewhat of a fetal position. “How ironic,” he said to the body.
After closing the trunk, he leaned back against it and assessed his situation.
The project failed. A lifetime of work disappeared as if caught up in a roaring fire. The opportunity to make a name for himself and change the world was gone.
The man in the trunk had given up just when things were finally coming together. He wasn’t committed. He was too weak. The man had failed.
But there was another.
***
Scott entered the break room in a bit of a daze. His cup was empty and he needed another shot before returning to an office full of spreadsheets, requisitions, and unread emails. Running his fingers through his thick blond hair he wondered how long he would keep it, given the stress of his job.
The room began to fade like images at the end of a movie and he went down like a sandbag. His head bashed on the tile floor as his eyesight slipped out of focus.
One of the custodians, an older lady he had bumped into as he hustled down the hall, called from the doorway. “Mr. Moore. Mr. Moore. Are you all right?”
Another custodian, dressed in a crisp, clean uniform, stood beside her in shock. Scott had not seen her before but he did notice a slight bump in her belly.
He heard a radio playing ’70s music. He was in a car, flying down a two-lane road. Rain fell and the road was slick. He was behind the wheel and in control of the car. Sorta. The wipers clunked back and forth, leaving watery streaks on the windshield, blurring the road ahead.
Looking down at his hands, he was surprised to see his fingernails were covered with nail polish. This is freakin’ weird. The image and sounds faded in and out and the radio blared some song about the prolific presence of signs in our world.
A pickup truck barreled down a side road heading toward him. He pounded the brake with his right foot and then with both feet, trying to slow down. The pickup—a Chevy?—bolted through the stop sign just as he hit the intersection sliding sideways. He screamed, except it didn’t sound like his voice. It was a woman’s voice—high pitched. He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt. He felt, actually felt, his chest slam into the steering wheel and heard tires squealing and metal scraping, bending, collapsing. The car spun around like a skateboarder doing a ten-eighty. It slammed again into the side of the speeding vehicle and Scott was thrown against the door, cracking glass with his head, and slamming his left ankle against the brake pedal, and then against the firewall. Something crunched. He wasn’t sure if it was metal, or ankle, or both.
He leaned right and braced himself as hard as he could against another side assault. He bounced off the passenger door like a basketball, hurtling in the opposite direction.
The hallucination faded in and out. Just before blacking out again he watched the custodian running toward him. He realized he had never noticed she walked with a limp.
Lying on rough, rocky asphalt facing the car, he studied the wreckage. The car was twisted and mangled like those strips of metal left behind after opening a can of sardines. His hip hurt like hell. He raised his head a bit, feeling a jolt of pain, and chanced a look into the gleaming hubcap. In its reflection he saw his body, bloody and disheveled. The face on the body wasn’t his but that of the custodian.
The hazy image faded and a new one took its place.
He was in a strange place, a big park. Dogs were running around in a fenced-in area.
The image seemed to slip in and out.
He was sitting on a park bench opposite a pregnant lady who sat on another park bench. He was talking with her, but Scott didn’t really understand it…Something about teaching in a University.
A systems analyst who had been reading a USA Today in the break room reached him first and started shaking his shoulder. “Wake up, Mr. Moore. Wake up.”
Scott came to again, surrounded by a small crowd of Bell Intelliservices employees. A security guard was there. So were a handful of front-liners. He shook off their concerns. “It’s okay, guys,” he said. “I just tripped. Probably stepped on my own shoelaces.” Looking down at his feet, he noticed both shoes were laced up, so he quickly bent over to untie and retie the lace on his right shoe.
A security guard helped him stand to his feet. “You need to see a doctor,” he said.
“No. Really. This happens all the time,” Scott said. “I’m just clumsy.” With that he stumbled out into the hallway and toward the front doors. “I’ll head home a little early today and get some rest. See you all tomorrow.”
Scott hated these seizures. Strange images, indiscernible and unpred
ictable, embarrassed him over and over. They had started when he was younger and seemed to be coming more often now. And, they were more intense.
“You’re in no shape to drive,” the security guard called. “Let us get you a cab.”
Scott shook his head and waved goodbye on his way to the lobby and through the huge glass doors. He could feel their stares piercing his back as he headed for his car in the parking lot. He’d go home and rest a bit before Grace got off work.
Tomorrow was going to be a tough day.
***
It would be a shitty day, maybe one of the shittiest. Scott pulled his Toyota Prius into the employee parking lot of the small inbound call center where he had worked for eight years. All of the five hundred souls who worked at this facility knew this particular day would come, but few knew when. Scott did.
Housed in a long, low prefabricated building thrown up at the start of the internet boom in the late ’90s, Bell Intelliservices provided incoming telephone customer service to about a dozen American businesses. Inside, hundreds of employees sat in rows upon rows of cubicles, answering phones methodically, efficiently, and professionally. Many similar organizations off-shored their inbound service centers to other countries, in particular, India and Colombia, where operators used names like Kevin and Mary in an effort to fool American callers into overlooking their thick accents. Others had outsourced to individuals working out of their homes using their own computers and telephone equipment. Bell, however, had hung onto the more traditional model and was no longer competitive. For several months executives at Bell made plans to make the company leaner in order to stay in business.
Leaner meant layoffs. At Bell, if headcount needed to be slashed, Scott Moore became the serial slasher.
His To Do List on this day included giving eighteen middle managers their walking papers. Someone else in Human Resources would oversee group layoffs of another hundred frontline employees. Chances were this would not be the last downsizing this year.
Performing such events—his boss called them “reducing our footprint”—was one of the worst aspects of Human Resources. Poor suckers in that department had to deliver the news of one of the most heart-rending experiences an employee might ever face and chances are a few of the human resource employees would be the first to go. Some executives at a much higher level in the organization decided to cut out-of-control expenses, often out of control because of reckless spending by those executives. They always cut labor costs. Layoffs were part of the insane binge-and-purge mentality of business executives who saw employees as more of a commodity than an asset. Scott hated such mass firings more than root canals, political corruption, and marital infidelity combined.
He climbed the steps to the front of the two story office building, entered the lobby, nodded to the receptionist who returned his greeting with a concerned frown as she had every day since the rumors began three months earlier, and right-turned down the hall to his office. He fished a key chain from his pocket and unlocked his office door, set his briefcase beneath his desk, and returned to the hall to fetch a large cup of hot, black coffee. Within ten minutes he had filled his cup, greeted his assistant, smiled at several office clerks, listened as a nasal-voiced recruiter complained about a supervisor’s treatment of her employees, and stepped into the office of Kathy Becker, Director of Human Resources.
Kathy’s office was a little larger than Scott’s, but the decor, the furniture, and the lighting were identical. Of course, Kathy had a bigger office chair. “Ready for this?” she asked, handing him a stack of beige folders containing severance papers. She was a rather large lady who wore flowing flowery dresses that draped around her office chair like a judge’s robes. Scott had often thought the larger chair might not have been a director’s perk but a simple necessity.
“No,” he replied, but the two proceeded anyway. They confirmed the names of the managers and directors on his list. Kathy encouraged him with a smile and the phrase, “I really don’t like ‘redundancy eliminations’—new catchphrase—But, it’s the best thing for the company, Scott.”
“I know,” he responded.
He returned to his desk, laid the folders out before him, picked up his phone, and dialed Anderson, Joy’s extension to ask her to come to his office. Flicking the button on his ballpoint pen, he waited for Joy to answer. The clicking rhythm was somehow soothing. Stealing a moment, he glanced at the framed portrait of he and Grace and Gumby taken on his thirty-fifth birthday. It centered him.
The shitty day began.
At lunch, Scott downed a ham sandwich and chips from vending machines in the HR break room. He never liked eating this way, but he had too much to do on this day.
At two forty-five he returned to Kathy’s office.
She spun around in her large chair. “How’d it go?” Her cheeks bulged when she smiled.
“Tough.” He handed the file folder to her. “Helen Watson is out sick today. Otherwise, I worked through the rest on the list without incident. Security has the swipe cards. Most of them handled it like professionals.”
“Good job,” she said, taking the folders from him. She swiveled her hefty frame around and retrieved another folder from the credenza behind her. Spinning back around she rested fleshy arms on her desk, sighed in an almost sincere manner, and looked into his eyes. “This is for you.”
The punch to his stomach knocked the air out of him. He noticed his hands trembled as he took the folder. Sweat dripped from his armpits staining his blue shirt. Shit. That was all that came to mind.
“This is so hard for me to do,” she said.
But she had no idea. He opened the folder, but the words and columns blurred together. He had given his best years to the company, working endless hours through countless weeks, to keep it afloat and productive, and the company repaid his hard work by dumping him like a diseased piece of meat. Betrayal was a bitch. Kathy was a bitch. Bell was a bitch.
“The severance is never enough, but it is more generous than that of some of our competitors.”
He had uttered the same words seventeen times that day. He looked up from the folder and saw her lips moving but heard nothing she said. Eight years with the call center, moving up from human resources supervisor to manager to assistant director, suppressing potential walkouts, heading off two union attempts, and a lawsuit to ultimately get axed. Shit, again.
“If you’d like to come in this weekend to collect your things, that might be easier.”
“Huh?”
“Just call me when you’re ready and I’ll make arrangements with security,” her lips said.
Kathy didn’t even have the balls to meet him when he came in for his belongings. No surprise there. He looked back at the blurry paper.
“You’ll land on your feet in no time,” she said, as he had said countless times before. She offered the same fat-cheeked smile and reached out to shake his hand.
Scott walked down the hall, past the receptionist’s desk in the lobby where he assumed she still smiled uncomfortably and through the front doors for one of his final times. Stunned by the day’s events, the blinding late afternoon sun only heightened his confusion. He stumbled down the front steps and into the parking lot. His hands dripped sweat, making his briefcase difficult to hold. His head ached like an infected wound.
“How could you do this to me?” Frank Johnson, a five-year veteran waited by Scott’s Prius. “Why did you pick me?” His clip-on tie was gone and his shirttail hung out of his pants, giving him a ragged, I-don’t-give-a-damn look. His glaring eyes would scare the eminent psychiatrist, Carl Jung.
“Frank,” Scott answered, holding up his hand and shaking his head. “It’s nothing personal. The company downsized.” He didn’t mention he was part of the down-sizing.
“What am I gonna do now? I’m sixty-one years old. Who would want to hire me?” A tart, pungent smell of whiskey floated from Frank to Scott in the hot afternoon breeze.
Scott felt thirsty.
H
e looked up through exhausted eyes into the face of someone worse off than himself. He searched his aching mind for the right calculated response, but came up with zeroes. “I don’t know, Frank.” Like a glaring spotlight the afternoon sun burned down mercilessly.
Frank’s eyes began to flood. He wiped the back of his hand across a sweaty lip.
“Look, Frank,” Scott said. “Take a couple of days off and then go through the outplacement program. You’ll be amazed at how helpful those guys can be.” He tried to make his voice sound convincing. It didn’t work. He and Frank knew it was bullshit.
Frank’s hands shook. “Brittany’s pregnant,” he whispered. “My daughter’s pregnant and she ain’t got nowhere to go.” The shaking moved from his hands to his shoulders.
“Ohhh, crap,” Scott muttered. He wanted to say he knew how Frank felt, but since he had no children himself it would be a lie. Ignoring his human resources training not to physically touch employees, he reached a hand out and pulled Frank into a man hug to calm him. “Certainly the severance pay, the extended insurance…”
“He left her,” Frank blubbered through muffled tears. “That no-good boyfriend of hers left after he knocked her up. I’ve gotta cover three mouths, and hospital expenses, now. I already have a second mortgage on the house. There’s nothin’ else I can do.”
“Something will come along, Frank. You’ll see.” But Scott didn’t believe it. Obviously, Frank didn’t either. He pulled away, shook his head and shuffled, defeated, to his aging truck in the back of the lot, his shoes sounding like sandpaper on the asphalt.
A hot breeze blew across the lot and Scott longed for his auto air conditioning. Leaning against his car, he watched as the beaten man drove away. He reached down to the door handle but lacked the energy to pull it open. He leaned again against the hot metal of the automobile. Finally, breathing in deeply, he pulled back and dragged the handle up. The door opened. It took Scott just about as much energy to climb into the driver’s seat and start the car.
2nd Sight: Capturing Insight Page 1