Dead end job

Streetlights sprayed bursts of stretching dappled amber that flared on the windows and floated softly across the empty seat next to him. The traffic had that Friday night feel of urgency. It broke through yellow lights and spilled into red, showed no care for speed limits or the slick and flooded roads, and bulged at every intersection, swelling until the green lights exploded into the shining darkness like gunshots and started it all off again.  The city was bursting at the seams.

Twice, a car horn blared just feet away as a would-be bar fly tried to rely on Sam’s hesitance and found the Jeep unwilling to give a scrap of acceleration. She was an absolutely maniacal driver, but she knew exactly how much road she could take down to the inch.

After about half an hour, Sam turned down the stereo and the amber swarmed sky gave way to a wide darkness where the lights flickered few and farther up, struggling against rain. The long shadowed face of the strip mall slid across the windows. Gradie thought of the Titanic, seen from that little diving pod, at the bottom of the sea. Still, dark, waiting. He had watched the videos over and over as a kid. Or had that been the other—

“We’re good to go, right girl?” Sam said.

“Yeah, all clear,” EP said, industrial metal thumping behind her. “Alan, mask up, and if I call out cops, it means they’re turning in the lot, and you have about half a minute to get out and down the slope. Understood?”

“Got it.” Gradie pulled the stocking material out from under his beanie and down over his face.

Sam killed the headlights and pulled around to the back door. The windshield was half solid darkness, half glittering distant lights hovering over the treeline.

“Timer starts now. Move fast,” EP said. Gradie jumped got out into the rain and Sam took off before he had the door shut. The lights in the back alley were all dead and the Jeep seemed to melt into the darkness. He felt suddenly that she would never come back, but the thought of being left on his own was electrifying despite being terrifying.

He got the key out, freshly milled at the safehouse by some wizardry courtesy of EP and Philip, and turned it smoothly in the lock. Water dripped down his mask and streamed between his leather gloves and his sleeves. The door opened into solid dry darkness, and he looked back one last time.

Beyond the flat blackness of the alley, where rainwater gushed out of the gutters and pooled in the drains, headlights moved in streams behind the trees and city lights smeared a glowing line halfway up the humming charcoal sky. He took a humid breath, smelled the rusty scent of the wet alley, and tried to preserve the feeling of being a shadow in the night, armed in all black, a soul skating across universes, a real—

“Get the fuck inside!” EP said. He stumbled in and closed the door. Inside, the rainsound was hollow like it was making way for something. He stood there, trying to remember what to do. He had instantly forgotten all the details and steps memorized at the safe house.

“Please, don’t make this hard,” EP said.

“Sorry.”

The map came hazily to mind.

Light switch in the receiving bay had been, where?

He got the flashlight out of his chest bag and waved a circle of light across the back door to the light switches and hit them all at once.

WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP

“Fuck!” Bag dropped, gun drawn, he blinked around at the bright room and the alarm sound died suddenly. His brain caught up with him and he realized the sound had come from inside his ears.

“You awake now?” EP said.

“I almost let a round off!”

“Is that code for something?”

Gradie laughed. So, she did have a sense of humor.

The adrenaline boiled over and jostled loose everything he had gone over at the club house. The maps and routes rolled out of memory and guided him through the receiving bay.

The searching was monotonous, but the feeling of the gun haunted his hands and he was severely aware of every exit at all times. The intruders never solidified into a daydream, but remained as a prickly sensation somewhere behind him.

At first, there was only the rain on the roof, storm sounds slipping through the door jam and shaking through the bay doors, and the shuffling of whatever Gradie was looking through, but eventually EP started helping.

“Look behind it too.” “Ladders in the corner to your left.” “The ones at the end of the row just got here.”

Gradie rolled over the idea that a quarter stuck behind a box or wedged under a pallet in the back of a discount department store could be of lethal importance to hyperdimensional Spirits with access to obscene amounts of Otherworld wealth, until it was no longer novel enough to dampen his annoyance.

“This is probably just me being new,” he said, when his gloves had gone from night assassin black to dusty shelf-stocker brown. “But this seems like a huge waste of time. Is there any chance I actually find this thing here?” He popped open the second vending machine and got the coin mechanism in his hand.

“Yes, or we wouldn’t have you come here,” EP said. “We don’t know how far back he pushed possession of it, and he’s not what you would call a stable individual. Could be anywhere.”

Gradie finished checking the years on the quarters and moved down the dark hall into the break room. An unreasonable panic shook over him before he could get to the switch. The lights came on in patches, and the last row flickered for a breath, like the room resented being woken up.

There was an eeriness to the place in the stillness of night. The fluorescent glare was different, somehow, this late. The chairs all askew like limbs locked in rigor mortis. The microwave and fridge held the light like dead vessels fated to stand unused for empty hours with the texture of tomb air. His implied reflection stretched across the linoleum like a ghost in the corner of a photograph.

He remembered working late one night in the Real, the month of unlimited overtime. The rows of fluorescent lights reflected off the floor-to-ceiling windows, creating a ghostly mirror double of the office that floated out over the dark parking lot towards the flickering highway. He had watched that mirror world slide by as he walked to the break room near midnight, and found the break room itself just as inverted as the mirror office.  A thing out of place. Light shining where only dark belonged.

The memory flared up and dissolved into another memory smoldering in the memory of his Self, another him, another office, another late night shift, and another humming break room, the same feeling in both, and here. It all felt like him. A Spirit seeing where there should be only blind ignorance, an entire world that shouldn’t exist.

“So what are the odds of me finding it then?” he said, to drive it all away. “You think like fifty-fifty, or—”

“Why, you want to bet or something?”

“Yeah, sure. If I find it, we go dancing in the Allclub, just you and me.”

The breakroom was dead quiet as he got the lock open on Cooper's locker and dumped the stuff on the floor. Did he piss her off again?

“All right, but when you don’t find it, you have to give me half your pay.”

“Fine. I don’t do this for the money anyway.”

“Don’t let Boss hear you say that. Then you’ll really be working for free.”

“I mean it. I don’t know what the fuck I’d buy in the dreamworld anyway.”

“Careful calling it that. If you start to think of it as a dream, you might drop out.”

“Tsh. I don’t think I’d ever dream that fucking place.”

More quiet. He got the lock off the other lockers on the list, then started digging through the pile.

“You really telling me you haven’t found anything worth paying for on the ball?”

He thought about it. All the flying, watching.

“Maybe like a really nice craft.”

“There you go. People spend fortunes on those.”

The silence stretched until he couldn’t stand it.

“I still don’t understand why anyone ever buys anything there.”

“To experience things they can’t in the Real,” EP said in that explaining tone she loved to use. “To see—”

“I’m doing that now.” He meant it, but EP saw him digging through the trash and laughed.

“Oh yeah. You’re living your best life.”

Gradie looked up at the security camera and scratched his mask with one finger.

“I was agreeing with you. I can see you pouting through the mask.”

Gradie left the trash on the floor and moved to the fridge.

“I meant like the shootouts and all the life and death shit. Oh but I guess you wouldn’t know about that, being a desk jockey.”

He liked it when she got mad, but she didn’t rise to the taunt.

“Oh yeah. You’re in the trenches. Hey, I think that ranch might have gone bad.”

He had most of the lunch boxes dumped out and realized the fridge was probably pointless. Cooper didn’t seem like the kind of guy to pack a lunch. He went out in the hall and started picking the lock on the office door.

“So, what do you buy in the Otherworld?”

“None of your business.”

“That dirty huh?”

“Just because the extent of your imagination is getting a nut, doesn’t mean everyone else is so simple.”

“What? How is that a dig against me? I was just saying I can’t understand why, in a place where you can fly and make things appear from nowhere, you would pay anyone else for anything.”

He got the door open and the lights on and found the dingy office waiting there with half of its walls covered in file cabinets like a fucking punch line.

“What if you wanted to do something crazy, something impossible,” EP said.

“I’ll just imagine it.”

“You actually think it’s that easy?”

“Yes,” he said, thinking about how hard it had been to make the mask. He was too far in it to turn back now.

“Is that why you spend all your time flying around and getting scammed by Ray’s?”

He started going through the drawers.

“You sure do keep tabs on me. Why don’t you just come along next time?”

He thought the pause was a bit on the long side this time.

“To eat some bullshit burgers?” she said.

“Yeah. You’re gonna be starving after I get done throwing you around the Allclub.” He let the smile slip into his voice.

“Now I’m really glad you won’t find it.”

A muffled thunderclap broke behind her voice.

“It’s raining there too? Are you close by?”

“Don’t be a creeper.”

“Maybe I can swing by tonight.”

“I’m tempted to give you the coordinates. Be funny to watch you trip a claymore.”

“Might be worth it.”

“Really?”  Her voice came out like an answering machine, and he wondered if she was trying too hard to keep something out of it.

“Depends. What are you wearing?”

A loud fast busy signal screamed in his ears.

“All right! Jesus! Worth a shot.”

The sound didn’t let up.

“Ok, Zoey. You got me.”

Still the fast busy. He popped the earbuds out and put them, still screaming, in his inside coat pocket.

The office was stripped open around him. All that was left was the safe. He found the combination in the intel folder on his phone and opened it.

Cash and slips. No quarter. He ran his hand through all the bills. Hundreds, twenties, all there in crisp reality. He counted out eight hundred dollars and held it in his hand. More than a full week’s take home in the real. The numbers on the paystub, remembered as if through fog, wavered, and the memories of the Self flexed their gravity.

Here, his Self made that much in a day. The amounts and shapes of his balance sheets floated in is mind with more clarity than anything remembered from his Real life. He remembered all the options he should have sold or exercised today, all the charts he should have checked, the earnings reports coming up next week, and panicked. What was he doing thumbing cash in a fucking retail safe? At a crime scene?

The thoughts fell short, their energy wasted against a wall of another idea: “This isn’t the real me either.” The Real felt unsubstantial because of its hazy distance, but this life failed to hold him because of some unnamable quality. It just felt wrong.

The pull of the Self faded back to a whisper beneath the sand, and he was left alone in the dusty quiet.

Wow. All that talk and warnings about him dropping out, the draw of the Self, and here he was looking that other him dead in the eye and feeling nothing.

Is it me? Another sign of my Spirit being abnormal? More evidence of my hopelessly separated relationship with reality. Even among dimension-hopping assassins, I’m the odd one out.

His phone vibrated in his pocket. The screen said it was Kate.

“Hey, I’m still looking. Nothing—”

“Holy shit dude! Did you take your earbuds out?!” Sam yelled.

“Yeah, Zoey—”

“She’s working on April. Cops rolled up on the apartment. I’m watching your drones. Good thing the cops didn’t drop in on you while I was trying to call you!”

“One sec, I’m putting them in.”

The earbuds beeped in his ear when he sealed them and then went quiet again.

“Kate?”

A long, dead pause, then a burst of driving and rain sounds.

“Two cars pulling into the lot! Get the fuck out!”

Gradie looked around, for a moment forgetting where anything else, including the exit, was in relation to the office, as if the universe outside the peeling walls was just a void dotted with cops.