Necromance in the Air - Chapter IV - (Fiction)
Teamwork makes the dream work
What steps will our intrepid duo take next? Felix is in trouble, how can he make it out of a room full of zombie heads when the lights go out? Lucy has discovered the building isn’t empty, but she has to move forwards.
There was a light coming from beneath the door, and she stopped herself from pulling down on the handle. Instead, she crouched down and rummaged around in the bumbag. “Satchel,” she said to herself, “I’m going to call it a satchel.” The satchel, was new, but it had already gained the interior detritus that plagued all bags. A rolled up receipt, though she’d purchased nothing, a coin in a foreign currency which she was confident was no longer in use, and tissue fluff.
Lint, the fibrous foe that clung to everything Lucy touched. Like a fool, she had worn black without a second thought, but here it was, ready to smother her in its tiny motes. “Bastard fluff.”
Finally, her fingers caught the edges of the earpiece and she pulled it free of the little black…satchel. She tried to wipe off any fluff that might have become attached to it, but it was hard to tell if it was free from the tendrils of torn tissue in the dim light, and she grimaced as she shoved it into her ear.
“Tony, can you hear me?”
There was a crackling sound and then Tony’s voice broke through. “Taking the earpiece out just means you can’t hear me. If you don’t want me to hear you, turn off the mic. Surprised you didn’t know that.
She hadn’t thought about it, but now she tried to remember if she’d put the microphone on before or after she’d gone to the toilet earlier. If she had, surely Tony wouldn’t have listened, would he? Was it a red flag that she questioned whether Tony would listen to her using the bathroom? Yes, Lucy realised, it would worry her to discover Tony enjoys listening to women go to the toilet.
“Are you listening?” Tony asked.
There was something different about Tony’s voice, as if he’d put it through an audio filter to make himself sound different, more masculine, more… She let out a small sad sigh as she realised her instincts had been screaming at her that there was something off about Tony, and she’d been ignoring them.
“The important point was not listening to you, so I didn’t really think about it.”
“Yeah, sure it was. Can you act like a grownup? How’s the mission proceeding?”
“Fine. I need to pass through an open plan office space to reach the staircase to the first level.”
“We already knew that. So everything is going as I planned?”
“That’s what I’m saying. It’s going as we planned.”
“You made it sound like you’d discovered something new, but you haven’t.”
She made fists and imagined slamming them into Tony’s smug face. It wasn’t a healthy form of meditation, but it helped. “Well, there is a light on?”
“So? People leave lights on. We’re not the electricity police.”
“Hang on,” she said, taking the ear piece out again.
She pressed her ear against the door and heard indistinct voices. “There’s definitely people in there. How can you make such bloody obvious mistakes, Tony?” She said, shoving the earpiece back in.
“—doesn’t make any difference. Our plan was going to need to adapt.”
“I missed that. I didn’t have the earpiece in.”
“How am I supposed to know that? Stop taking it out, just keep it in your ear. Why are you making this so difficult?”
“Me? How am I making it difficult? Thanks to you, I’m locked in a building, filled with employees of some kind of dark occult organisation, in the middle of the night. It was supposed to be an empty building.”
“Calm down. They’re probably all temps. Pretend you’re the new girl or something.”
“The new girl?”
“Yeah. That explains why you’re clueless. Say the temp agency sent you.”
“I’m dressed like a burglar.”
“Well, change it up. Take the jumper off or something.”
“I wore nothing under it, Tony.”
“It’s the middle of the night. Nobody will care.
“Who turns up to a new job in a sports bra?”
“Hang on.”
“Hang on for what?... Tony?”
She wiggled her finger in her ear where the earpiece was, and immediately regretted it as she pushed it in further. Panic settled in as she tried to pull it out, but every attempt to grab it just seemed to push it further in.
“Right,” Tony’s voice burst through the earpiece, louder than before. “Your name is Felicity Snark, and you’re a new temp with loads of experience in customer service. So you walk in as if you’re expected and then act surprised when there’s no record of you. It’s an administrative error on their part. You’ll be fine.”
“Felicity…Snark?”
“It’s an actual person in the records of a temp agency they’ve used before.”
“But they haven’t met her?”
“No, I checked. You’re all sorted.”
She took a breath and stood, placing a hand on the door handle. “Right, I’m Felicity Snark, I can do this.”
“Wait, something just—”
The light flickered, then went out.
“Tony, did you just turn off the power?”
“Um...no?”
“Right.”
“This helps. The confusion will make them less bothered about a wayward temp walking in. It’s a perfect distraction.”
“Or, they could think I have something to do with it.”
“Why would they think—”
“Because I’m dressed like a costume party ninja?”
“You’re breaking up, sssshhhckkk, go, scchk, for it.”
“I know you’re faking…Tony…you’re a knob.”
She tugged at the ear-piece, trying to get a fingernail beneath it. The faint terror that she might be stuck with it in her ear, or be forced to visit a hospital to have it removed with tweezers, danced through her thoughts. Then it popped out and skittered across the tiled floor. The limited faint light passing through the glass doors at the entrance to the building made it difficult to see. She fell to her hands and knees, scrabbling around, trying to find it. Finally, her fingers met with the device and she put it into the bag at her waist. She stood up, dusted herself down, and approached the door.
She took a breath and put her ear against the door once more. It was colder than she’d expected. The murmured voices had fallen silent when the light had gone out. She strained to hear anything, reminded herself that you can’t make your hearing better by straining anything, and listened. There was near silence. Then she heard the word ‘pizza’, but it was distant, from somewhere further beyond the room.
“Okay, I’m going in—” But something stopped her as she had her fingertips on the door handle.
In the distance a name was being called. “Marco.”
Then came the chanting…
——————————————————————————
Felix stumbled as his foot caught on something by his feet. “Come on people, we need to work as a team. A collaborative effort to achieve a common goal.”
“It’s not my goal.”
“Who said that?” Felix said, his head whipping right in the darkness. “Clarence, was that you?”
There was no response.
“Okay. Listen folks, there’s no ‘I’ in ‘team’, remember? Now, when I say Marco, those people nearest the door say Polo. When I say ‘Moving’, everybody needs to hum. It’ll stop me bumping into you.”
“What do we hum?” A feminine voice asked from Felix’s left.
He gripped his own wrist with the gloved hand. His fingertips were tingling where the magical goop had made contact. Something was wrong and he could feel the metaphorical tendrils of terror wrapping themselves around him. He tried to remember what the counsellor had said about dealing with stress. A panic attack threatened, but he recognised the warning signs. Breathe, stay calm, think through the situation. Count down from ten. What had he forgotten to do? “I don’t think it really matters—”
“How about the Star Wars theme?” an excited voice called out.
Another voice, this one somewhere behind him. “What’s Star Wars?”
“No, that won’t work. It has to be something older. Some of us died before it came out.” He recognised that one. This was a bad idea. It was going to go wrong.
“But I like that one—”
“—we have to be inclusive. That’s important. Remember the training video?”
Felix felt the air leaving his lungs, a sigh of equal parts frustration and fear. He focused on opening and closing a fist with his exposed hand. “It doesn’t matter what we hum. It’s so I don’t bump into you or other stuff,” he said, but his voice didn’t carry. They were to wrapped up in their own conversation. “It’s not a bloody performance piece.”
“He thinks we’re going to eat him.”
“Preposterous, he looks like he’d taste of polyester and cheap hair gel.”
“I bet he’s all stringy. We’d be chewing for hours.”
“That’s it!” He shouted. A hush fell over the room. “Can we all stop discussing what I would be like to eat? It’s not conducive to a pleasant working environment. Some might even call it harassment. Let’s all remember the office motto. I may not be alive, may be a head, but that doesn’t mean my manners are dead. Come on, everyone.”
The room filled with a sad, disorganised chorus. “I may not be alive…manners…dead.”
Quiet fell, and Felix slowed his breathing. “Okay, so when I say—”
“In the Hall of the Mountain King? Everybody knows that one, right?” A voice burst out.
His foot caught against something new. A cable? A table leg? His heart rate sped up again. Why was his hand itching so much? “No, I don’t think that’s going to be the most helpful—”
“Dum, dum, dum, dum du—”
“For fu—”
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PHENOMENAL! The office motto 🤣🤣🤣