Sta.sh
Episode 1 : Last day at the office
by Javier Cabrera
cover art Carlos Cabrera
I knocked out five of his teeth with a fist so hard that his whole face exploded in blood and before he collapsed into the "Star Wars Wampa" rug his wife got him for Christmas, I connected a second one right under his stomach making him squeal like the pig he was. I didn't turn back to see, but the noises of curious chairs inside the cubicle farm and the silence that came afterwards was enough to know everyone's eyes were burning holes through the venetian blinds of Smith's office, just like I wanted to.
He was still conscious when I began to kick him around. Now, I got to admit things went out of hand for a moment there, but I had to make sure he would not go unnoticed in a crowd anymore. Was hard though, ignoring all those wet sounds he made, but when I was done his face was nothing but a pulpy mass of flesh begging me to stop and the message was on his way. They will hear me now. A complain they wouldn't be able to put on the bottom drawer. Not this one. This one they'll have to deal with.
It's fair to say no one ever saw that coming. Not from me anyway. The perfect employee. The "yes sir" guy. The big Jack Nash, Forbes Magazine's most influential developer of 2002, winner of the Best Hacker of the year award and the promise of Arkansas. The golden boy. The success.
But that was yesterday. Today I'm pushing forty and Smith had gotten up from his bed thinking no one at the company cared about the press conference he had given the night before. He brushed his teeth while listening to his wife's compliments about how handsome he was on TV with all those microphones pointed at his face and how her friends tweeted about the conference all night. I'm pretty sure management called to congratulate Smith when he was at the kitchen table having breakfast with his two daughters. "Dad's getting a promotion before Christmas for sure, girls." His wife's panties must have been on fire when she passed him the call. Slave of the month.
Four employees from one of the most prominent tech companies in Silicon Valley had disappeared without leaving a single trace that the police could use to start an investigation. It should have been pretty big news considering every single one of them was inside Building seven when it happened, but it wasn't. Management made sure of that. Smith was sent to feed garbage to the press and there they were, eating it up like it was pie.
But the pie is a lie, and today, Smith's office became a cemetery, and I, the undertaker.
By the time I was done the security guards Smith's assistant called in were too late to do something about it. They must have thought she was overreacting. Honestly, how many security related incidents does a web company have? A bunch of nerds in a big office space playing with Halo helmets and mini catapults aren't exactly something to take the stairs for.
They weren't late by much though, just a couple of seconds after Smith coughed blood up all over the place and fainted, making the wet sounds of defeat. You could see the deception slowly drawn onto their faces, like one of those old Bug Bunny cartoons. The king had been executed and they were too late to see the head roll into the basket. They almost made me feel guilty these two -- I had put on a pretty damned good show.
No one tried to cuff me though, not after seeing Smith's twisted body on the floor. The handcuffs weren't part of their job description anyway -- that was all Smith; he liked to make security look like some kind of personal guard he was able to push people around with to feel what Capone must have felt when everyone smiled through their teeth. None of the other six buildings had security personnel with handcuffs, only building seven of the Emastudios Corporation. Rumors about him wanting them to carry guns around were usual on chain mails until management stepped forward. "We do SaaS software here, not plutonium. We'll never allow armed personnel within our property, and that's final."
Smith went mad as hell those days and fired every security guard management sent to Building seven and hired his own; bodybuilders he finger picked himself from the local nightclubs. The meaner they looked, the better. Only that's all they were good for, their looks.
And that's exactly why all they limited themselves to after I rammed Smith's teeth down his throat was walking me to my desk and asking me, very politely, to wait there until police arrived. Security called Smith a ride too, only his was an ambulance and he had to wait for it on the floor.
Copyright © 2012 Javier Cabrera & CabreraBrothers.
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