The Consultant (23 page)

“I didn’t do that!”  

“With users able to download and play a version of the game for free, why would they shell out money to buy
Zombie Navy
? You may have single-handedly bankrupted the company. At the very least, you have caused significant financial harm during a fragile rebuilding period.”  

“I didn’t do it!” Jack insisted.  

“You keep saying that, but we know you did.”  

“I don’t even have access to new games! I
couldn’t
have done it!”  

There was a significant pause and Jack jumped on it. “Maybe I’ve been set up,” he told the consultant, “maybe there’s been a misunderstanding. I don’t know. But check it out. I swear it wasn’t me.”  

He could see that he’d gotten through, and Patoff looked at him for a moment, then stood. “I’ll be back,” the consultant promised.  

The lights remained on as Patoff walked around the table, past him and out the door. The second he heard the door click closed, Jack started trying to wiggle his way out of his bonds. He’d been tied to the chair with not rope or twine but some type of coated electrical wire, like the kind used in old radios and televisions. The wire had much less give than rope, was much more effective at keeping him bound, and he was unable to gain even an inch of slack.  

His eyes were now completely adjusted to the light, and he looked around the room, hoping to spot something he could use to free himself. The table before him was completely empty, as was the area around his feet, but on the far side of the narrow room, past the chair where the consultant had been sitting, on the floor next to the right wall, were two poles, each about three feet long.  

One of them ended in a pointed spearhead, the other in a barbed hook.  

Jack began jerking his hands and feet violently back and forth, trying desperately to escape.  

There was a loud click behind him as the door opened once again. The consultant passed by him on the right and stood on the other side of the table, not sitting down. “You’re right,” Patoff said. “You didn’t do it.” He waved his arm magnanimously. “You’re free to go.”  

The wire, somehow, had become untied and lay on the floor beneath Jack’s suddenly loose hands and feet.  

He stood. His first impulse was to yell at the consultant, to threaten the man with jail time for capturing, confining and restraining him against his will, but common sense won out, and he decided it was better to bring that up when he was safely out of here and around other people. He exited the room, not saying anything to the consultant or even looking in his direction.  

He strode purposefully down the hall, and it took him a moment to realize that he didn’t recognize where he was. The corridors looked like CompWare corridors, the doors looked like CompWare doors, but…something was off. Everything he saw was not quite right: the color of the floor, the shape of the lights, the font of the numbers identifying the rooms. He saw no other people, and that was odd, too.  

Disconcerted, he hurried over to the elevators.  

Only…  

Only the elevators weren’t there. Instead, a bare wall stretched over that space, its color a slightly
whiter
white than the ones he was used to in this building.  

Was
it this building?  

Jack was not sure. He decided he needed to find a window. If he could look outside, get his bearings, maybe it would help him figure out where he was and how to get out of here. At CompWare, the offices on the opposite side of the corridor from the elevators overlooked the campus, and he walked across the hall, trying three doors before he found one that opened.  

It had no window.  

It was also not an office. It looked more like a living room, and, frowning, he peered into the enclosed space. On the walls were old-fashioned paintings in elaborate wooden frames: a sailing ship, a New England town, a race track with horses and jockeys milling about. In front of an ugly brown couch was a long low coffee table, and on the side of the couch was a smaller, higher end table.  

On the end table was a bottle of pills.  

Jack stood there, staring. He recognized that end table. It was the same as the one in his grandmother’s house, the one next to her sickbed where she’d kept all of her medicine. She’d died when he was twelve, overdosing on the medication that was supposed to help her through the worst side-effects of the chemo, and no one in his family had ever been sure if her death had been accidental or intentional. On the one hand, the bottle holding the high-dose medicine had been almost identical to the one holding the low-level aspirin-based pain reliever. On the other hand, she’d spent over a month in that bed and had never made the mistake of confusing the two.  

How could that table and medicine be here, though?  

And why?  

He was supposed to kill himself.
 

Jack slammed the door shut and ran down the hallway, away from the room. He had to get out of here. In the normal version of CompWare, the
right
version, he would be running toward the north stairwell, but the corridor didn’t end where it was supposed to, it continued on, and other corridors branched off to the sides, all of them lined with closed doors that
looked
like CompWare doors—but weren’t.  

He hadn’t been merely hurrying down the hallway, he’d been
running
, and he slowed, then stopped, out of breath. Was there any way out of here? There were doors to either side of him, and he tried opening the one on the right. It was unlocked, and inside the windowless and otherwise empty room a bottle of pills sat atop his grandmother’s end table.  

Closing that door, he tried the other one on the opposite side of the corridor.  

The end table and pills were right next to the entrance.  

He tried to slam the door, but the hinges wouldn’t allow it, and the door closed slowly.  

“Help!” he called out, feeling weak and pathetic as he did so. “Help!”  

There was no response, but he thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye, up the corridor in the direction he’d been running. “Hey!” he yelled, and though he was still short of breath, he sprinted up the hallway. He saw no movement ahead of him, but down side hallways, in his peripheral vision, there always seemed to be a figure. Blurry, out of focus, too ill-defined for him to even ascribe it a shape, it moved out of sight before he could focus on it.  

He chased the elusive form for over an hour before finally giving up and trying yet another door.  

There again, this time in a hospital setting, was his grandmother’s end table and the pills.  

Was there any other way out?
 

He was beginning to think there wasn’t, but there was no way in hell that he was going to kill himself. He’d run through these hallways forever if he had to, but he was not giving up, and if it was the last thing he ever did, he would find that consultant and make him pay.  

Jack closed the door.  

And ran farther down the corridor.  

NINETEEN  

“I wish I could quit,” Angie said after putting Dylan to bed. Craig, on the couch, looked up from the television, surprised. “Why? What happened?”  

“Nothing happened.” She sighed, sitting down next to him. “Well, nothing specific. But ever since…Pam, I just don’t feel comfortable there anymore.”  

“You
can
quit,” he said, though he sounded dubious.  

She smiled. “Thanks for the enthusiastic support.”  

“No, I mean—”  

“I understand. But we both know that with your situation so shaky, it would be stupid for me to give up my job.”  

“It doesn’t mean you can’t look around. What if you find something better? As long as you have something else lined up before you resign…”  

“Yeah, but I have seniority here. And they let me have the schedule I want. Someplace new, I’d be bottom person on the totem pole.”  

“I don’t know what to tell you.”  

She shrugged. “There’s nothing to say. Unless we win the lottery, we’re pretty much stuck.”  

“I’ll buy a ticket tomorrow,” he promised.  

Smiling, she kissed his cheek. “The drawing’s tonight,” she said. “But it’s the thought that counts.”  

“Next time, then.”  

The next day was Sunday, and Craig and Dylan were going to go to a Pet Expo at the L. A. Convention Center. That sounded like fun, and Angie almost called in sick to join them, but she decided at the last minute to tough it out and head to work.  

The consultant was waiting for her outside the Urgent Care, next to the alcove that housed the employee’s entrance, holding a sheaf of papers in his hand. Above his geeky clothes and below his atrocious toupee, his eyes stared intently at her with his usual needy nervousness. She smiled politely as she approached, nodding a generic greeting, intending to walk by him, but when he said her name, she stopped.  

The consultant glanced awkwardly down at his feet, holding out the sheaf of papers. “We’re out,” he said. “Private Practices has been replaced. But I already started on my report, and you were always nice to me, so I thought I’d give you a copy anyway. You can look at it, compare it to what the new consultants say. Maybe… maybe it’ll help.”  

“What happened?” Angie asked.  

“You were poached. Apparently, this other company’s really aggressive. They started doing polls and surveys, trying to prove that we weren’t efficient—”  

“Oh my God!” she said. “I got one of those calls! I hung up on them. That wasn’t you? I thought it was you guys.”  

He shook his head. “No, it was BFG.”  

She suddenly felt cold. “BFG?”  

“That’s the company taking over from us. Apparently, there was some sort of clause in our contract that they managed to exploit. If your management determined that we weren’t effective, the agreement could be voided and other consultants found to do the job. So BFG bombarded them with polls and studies purporting to show that they were wonderful and we were terrible. And now…we’re out.”  

“I’m sorry,” Angie said.  

The consultant sighed. “It wouldn’t bother me so much if I hadn’t already started writing the report. But I put a lot of work into this—we all have—and I think our suggestions are pretty good. Just throwing it all away seems like such a waste. Besides, I’ve
heard
things about BFG,” he admitted, and the way he said it sent goose bumps surfing down her arms.  

“What have you heard?” she asked.  

“I probably shouldn’t say.”  

“What?”  

He spoke carefully. “Well, I’ve heard, second hand, maybe third hand, that their methods… sometimes…are not always… that they, ah, don’t just observe and report, that they get
involved
. Like most consultants, we study and scrutinize each workplace we’re hired to survey, and we make recommendations based on what we’ve seen. But BFG…I’ve heard they’re more hands-on— and a lot of people don’t like it. They look good on paper, and maybe they have some references, but a lot of their customers…they don’t end up happy.”  

“Do you have any more…?”  

“Details? No. I’ve already said more than I should. Anyway, you have my report, or the rough draft of it. Maybe it’ll help you.” He looked at his watch. “I’d better go.” The consultant gave her an awkward hug, leaning in too close, and she felt a hard penis press against her stomach. She pulled quickly away, disgusted. If he were still monitoring the Urgent Care, she would have taken some sort of action, gone up the ladder to his superiors. But as this would be the end of their contact, she made the decision to ignore the incident and let it go.  

Red-faced, he turned away and hurried into the parking lot. At least he had the decency to be embarrassed.  

From what Craig said, she doubted that BFG would be as human.  

Angie opened the door, walking into the building and looking down at the pile of papers in her hand. The pages were held together with a clip at the top, and the cover page was blank, probably to disguise what was beneath. Part of her was afraid to open the report, fearing some sort of Jack Torrance manuscript: the same phrase repeated over and over again, single-spaced, double-sided. But when she walked up the hallway, reached the front desk, sat down in an empty chair and flipped up the cover page, she saw a flow chart of the Urgent Care’s weekday and weekend staffing.  

“What’re you reading?” Sharon asked, walking up and stashing her purse under the counter.  

“Apparently, we’re getting new consultants. The old one gave me this. It’s his initial report.”  

“He’s gone?” Sharon said. “Thank God. That weirdo gave me the creeps.”  

“He
is
a weirdo, and he
is
creepy, but I’m not so sure these new guys are going to be any better.” She gave the other nurse a short rundown of Craig’s experience with BFG at CompWare.  

“Why do we even need consultants at all?” Sharon asked. “
We
know what works and what doesn’t. All they have to do is ask us.”  

“My point exactly.” Angie flipped through the report, skimming a section marked “Conclusions” at the bottom of one of the pages. The suggestions seemed reasonable and much more astute than she would have guessed, based on the consultant’s demeanor. But she didn’t have time to read the whole thing. The doctors and other nurses were arriving, and it would soon be time to let in patients. She needed to get ready for this morning’s shift.  

She turned on the computer in front of her, logging on and clocking in, while Sharon did the same on the next machine over. It was her turn to inventory the exam rooms for supplies, so she stowed the report on the same shelf under the counter where Sharon had put her purse and headed back down the hall, wondering when the consultants from BFG were going to arrive—  

I’ve
heard
things about BFG
.  

—and what would happen when they did.  

**** 

When Craig walked into work Monday morning, there was a man seated in the guest chair in his office. The chair had been moved from in front of his desk to the wall next to the refrigerator. Young and clean-cut, like a
Sound of Music
Nazi, the man did not bother to look up, and even if he had not been typing on an electronic tablet resting on his lap, Craig would have known why he was there.