Just Another Job (33 page)

Johnykin’s heart pumped faster as she took
the final step up to the second floor door. This door had no locks
and creaked open with a firm push. Inside was not the revelation
she hoped for. There was no secret cache of machine guns or rocket
launchers that would make everything convenient. Instead, hundreds
of worn out computers and large tube monitors spread across the
floor in piles. Mechanical mouses, floppy drives, and dot matrix
printers gathered dust along with their various obsolete
cousins.

Something had to be useful amidst the piles
of junk. Johnykin told herself this as she swam through the first
wave of off-white plastics. A lot of the equipment was heavy. They
could throw the monitors or keyboards at Erik, thought Johnykin.
Instead she continued to search for a more effective weapon.

Chris's thinking ran smoothly again. The
blips of distracting thoughts barely registered in the back of his
mind and his hands moved confidently through the steps of
constructing a new wired adapter.

Frank made just as much progress, more in
fact, when he shouted, “I'm through!”

Chris looked up to see an overjoyed and
tired face. “One more minute.” He soldered the last wire carefully
to the tiny motherboard of the drive. “Start opening up the
laptop.”

Frank dove to the floor of tools looking for
screwdrivers and then started underneath the tray that held the
underside of the laptop in an inconvenient position for what they
needed. Chris kept his eye on the solidified metal while tugging
lightly on the wire that was held fast to it. The drive was ready.
Chris stood up and felt his back pop in several places from
hunching over for who knew how long.

“What time is it?” asked Frank.

Chris set the drive next to the laptop and
pulled his phone out of the bag. “Almost 12:30. I don't see more
than another half hour before Erik finally gets here.”

“Unless he stops for lunch,” said Frank.
“Fuck yeah!” Frank freed the laptop and flipped it over. In less
than a minute the bottom plastic cover was open. Chris moved into
position for his turn. His gut told him to be especially careful at
this junction. They couldn't risk damaging the laptop or drive.
Even with the extra precaution, Chris took only a few minutes to
make the connection. He stepped back and could feel the butterflies
rising in his chest as the plan took its final steps to
completion.

“Alright,” said Chris more to himself than
Frank.

Frank carefully moved the laptop back to a
position he could work with. Chris's connection was flawless. Frank
opened the drive and found the video file. He double-clicked it.
Immediately an error message popped up. “What!?” said Frank, as he
continued to work. He copied the file to the desktop and opened it
again. The same message popped up. The data was corrupted. Frank
ran through the strands of broken data. “Fuck!”

“No,” said Chris. He saw the error over
Frank's shoulder. Chris's mind jumped back in time through the
day's events. It could have been damaged when he crushed it, but
when he was working on it there weren't any physical signs of it.
Back further in time, he replayed the visit to Erik's office. He
pulled out the drive when it was copying to the laptop without
performing a safe removal. That was it. It was his fault.

Frank stomped around looking for something
to kick or help alleviate the massive frustration clinging to every
inch of his skin. Chris stood motionless. He couldn't feel his
skin. They had nothing but time ticking away until Erik showed
up.

“Wait. We’re in the server room,” said
Chris. The words came out, but they didn't feel like they were his
own. His mouth kept going, though. “You can remotely enter Alex’s
computer from here. I know the labs used X-Tech as their outside
link. It’s practically what we were doing originally. Just pull the
video from his desktop and then re-launch it from the laptop here
to play over everyone’s devices.” Chris stopped and looked at Frank
in wonderment. The idea and expelling of it still felt alien to
Chris but it sounded like a good one. Frank agreed.

“That’s going to take longer but I can
locate his ISP and...” Frank stopped talking and put it to
action.

Chris was still in a daze over the help or
whatever it was he received before his eyes focused on the room
around them. “Where's Johnykin?” Frank didn't have time to answer.
Chris grabbed his phone and already put himself at the stairs
leading out of the basement in search of their security guard.

Chris could barely make out the shapes of
employees gathered in a small patch of grass and trees, reserved as
a mini-park for the downtown crowd, across the street. Even with
the obscured view through the glass doors, Chris saw what he
expected; heads tilted down to look at smartphones. He moved away
from the entrance and bobbed and weaved around the cubicles until
he thought better of everything. He remembered Frank telling him
about the second floor storage. It would have to be accessed from
the back of the building.

There wasn’t any point in wasting more time.
Even without signs of Erik yet, those phones outside were sure to
spread this latest drama, so Chris sprinted for the back and the
already open door. He didn’t know what Johnykin might find up there
that was useful, but he needed her to set up their ensuing
escape.

Chris’s fast pace up the stairs echoed
everywhere making it impossible for him to call out Johnykin’s name
or hear a response. But in a few seconds he was at the top of the
landing and staring straight into the wide opening of a musket.
Chris’s legs buckled beneath him from fear and also as an escape
from getting his face blown off.

“Holy shit, you scared me,” said Johnykin,
lowering the gun.

“Where did you find that?” asked Chris from
the floor.

Johnykin helped him to his feet. “It’s a
prop. At least I think it is. There are boxes full of old looking
guns, blunt swords, and clothes from every time period before, I
think, the 50s.”

“Show me,” said Chris. He was already
walking but Johnykin guided him past the accumulation of X-Tech’s
contribution of waste to rows of boxes in different states of
decay. Chris pulled at a cardboard flap and half of it tore off.
The aged flap disintegrated in his hand.

Inside the box, Chris dug up a pair of
matching shirts with large lace collars and worn out tights to go
with them.

“Must’ve been an old theater,” said
Johnykin. She went through a box next to Chris and pulled out a
Victorian era dress.

“Uh-huh,” said Chris. He scanned the
costumes trying to find some worth in them for his plan when his
phone buzzed. It was Frank. “Did you find it?”

“No. Did you hear that noise?” said Frank.
Chris could hear Frank still typing through the phone.

“What noise? What did it sound like?”

“There it is again. Where the hell are
you?”

“Second floor. We’ll check it out.” Chris
hung up and motioned to Johnykin to follow. They went down the
stairs slowly, listening for whatever Frank had heard. At the
bottom of the stairs, the noise came in loud and clear.

Erik’s overtly masculine voice amplified by
a megaphone broke into the first floor of the X-Tech headquarters.
“…open the doors to assist you. We understand the terrorist threat
has escalated above your means. We’re here to help you.”

Chris stopped himself and Johnykin from
going any further than the door. He called up Frank, “It’s Erik.
He’s outside on a speaker calling to let him in. He’s going along
with the bomb threat. Are you done?”

“Shit. No! There are thousands of lines of
data to get through. I found the labs, but I have to go through
each computer’s data reads before I can identify Alex’s.”

“Just remotely access each one. You’ll see
their desktop. Alex had that full moon picture on his,” said
Chris.

“Fuck you. Why didn’t you say that earlier?
Alright, ten minutes max. You better have a good escape plan.”
Frank hung up.

Chris looked at Johnykin, “Where are those
guns and swords?”

She turned up the stairs at a run with Chris
on her heels. Johnykin took him directly to a series of boxes
stacked on one another to about four feet high. The top boxes were
open from Johnykin’s earlier rummaging. Chris tore into the boxes.
Some of them were clothes like the earlier ones, but he found
another gun; a small pistol. It was metal and felt and looked real
but there was nothing in the cylinder.

They went through all the boxes: shields,
boas, a wooden Tommy gun, blunt swords, top hats, helmets, pieces
of armor, a spear. Chris’s mind ran through the possibilities of
each prop and the relative success each or all would bring to their
escape/survival.

Johnykin picked up the pistol and wooden
Tommy gun. “Come on, Chris. We can bluff our way out. Erik doesn’t
want a shootout.”

Chris imagined them with the guns pointed at
Erik. Erik laughed at the gesture and shot them down without
hesitation. “No. That’ll just get us killed. Here.” Chris grabbed a
gold helmet and handed it to Johnykin.

“This isn’t going to give any protection.”
Chris ran his hands through the pile and pushed her a matching
breastplate and girdle. He then topped it off with a sword covered
in chipped gold paint. “A Greek soldier?”

“It’s all about the first impression, or
second…” said Chris, and dove back in to gather a set of armor for
Frank and himself.

They didn’t completely match, but in Chris’s
mind that authenticated the look more. He picked up the shield and
then went for the spear. As he pulled, the spear caught on a thick
cloth tarp. Chris yanked the spear and tarp free with a billow of
dust to reveal a cannon.

“We can use that,” said Johnykin. She wiped
some dust from the barrel. A bronze gleam came through.

From the muzzle to the wheel base, the
entire thing was less than four feet long, but Chris thought it fit
the image he was going for. He searched around for more. “We could
definitely use it if it fires.”

“I doubt there’s a cannonball sitting around
up here.”

“We don’t need that, just gunpowder to buy
some time.”

“There's nothing here. We have to go. Erik
won't wait forever for us to open the doors.”

“Help me push it down the stairs,” said
Chris.

The wheels groaned under the weight but
still propelled the cannon forward with the help of Johnykin and
Chris behind it. They stopped at the top of the stairs to gain a
better vantage point of the effect of pushing such an old, heavy
object down a series of steps would entail.

“I’ll get in front, you push the back,” said
Chris, and did just that.

All of it was awkward, from wearing the
stiff, fake armor to providing a stable balance of pushing from the
front and back. Yet they made it to the bottom and continued to
roll across the first floor past the cubicles to the front
entrance.

Chris stopped them right behind the last
cubicle before they became visible through the glass doors. They
hadn’t heard any more megaphone announcements from Erik. Chris knew
they were running out of time.

“Stay with the cannon. I have to check on
Frank,” said Chris and ran with his head down below the cubicles to
the entrance of the basement holding the extra set of armor and
spear.

Inside the basement, Chris sprinted over to
a still furiously typing Frank that was now sweating amidst the air
conditioned climate.

“No! I’m still looking,” said Frank.

“I don’t know when, but I know soon Erik’s
coming through the front door and there are no witnesses down here
or inside the building to see what he does when he finds us,” said
Chris. “We’re leaving the next time I come down here, with the
release of the video or not.”

Frank never looked at Chris. Chris dumped
the armor and spear with a clang. Frank turned to see the noise and
his friend’s garish outfit. “The hell?” said Frank.

“You don’t have to dye any grey hairs, but
have that on before I come back,” said Chris. Then he grabbed the
tools and stuffed them into the black bag before rushing back out
of the basement.

On the first floor again, Chris raced back
still consciously keeping his head down. Then Erik’s voice rang out
once more, “We’re moving in to help. Do not be alarmed.”

Chris bowled over Johnykin as he skidded to
a stop. He flung the black bag from the basement down to dig
through the contents.

“What are we going to do, Chris?” asked
Johnykin. Her headpiece slipped down slightly and she struggled to
adjust it.

Chris thought it all seemed less likely to
work at this point, but he couldn’t come up with anything else.
“Trust me,” said Chris. He had the soldering iron in his hand. He
ducked into the cubicle next to them and pulled a power strip to
its full length and plugged in the iron. The plug reached just far
enough to drop the iron in the vent of the cannon.

A thunderous crash of broken glass
frightened Chris and Johnykin into each other’s arms for
protection. Once Chris realized what the sound must mean, he leaned
around the corner of the cubicle to confirm it.

Erik stepped across the threshold of the
X-Tech headquarters. The pieces of glass crunched under his feet as
he took as wide a stance as his short legs could comfortably make
in the center of the lobby. Four other men walked in right behind
him. Erik’s shoulder was bandaged up, but he wore it with pride and
Chris couldn’t see a gun in Erik’s hand or on his hip unlike the
rest of his posse. Each of the four men kept a hand close to the
holster’s on their hips, ready for any sudden movement or need to
defend the boss.

Erik spun on the broken glass beneath his
feet and gave an exaggerated wave to the outside. The crowds were
still there to take in the drama. Then Erik came back around. Chris
had to take action now.