Undead and Underwater (9 page)

“So at last, you’ve come.” Edward Smegger turned slowly in his large black office chair, the back so flared it looked like a throne on wheels.

He was dressed in an alarming uniform of red jeans, white lab coat, and loafers in traffic-cone orange, but no shirt or socks. His shoulder-length gray hair (premature . . . Edward was thirty-one) looked more scraggly and mad scientist-ish than usual. He was so thin the bones of his wrists looked like they could be used as bladed weapons. “I wondered when you’d be here, you pathetic drone.”

“She’s not pathetic,” Linus warned.

“Thank you, Linus,” she replied. “Now then: we’ve had this talk before, Edward. This is not appropriate workplace attire. And you’re supposed to display your employee badge above the waist at all times.”

“The clip hurts my nipple,” he complained.

“At least this isn’t jarring or weird,” Linus muttered.

“And out there? In your world you think is so safe and so sane?” He stroked the small white object in his arms. “Your apathy, your refusal of your gifts . . . is that appropriate for the workplace?”

Distracted by what the man was holding, Linus raised his hand, as if waiting to be called on, and when Edward nodded, asked, “Are you petting a fake cat?”

“I’m allergic,” he explained primly, stroking the glassy-eyed stuffed animal. “But l’il Éowyn of Rohan understands me. She’s the one who told me what to do. She is my constant companion, my one and only true friend. And she is here with me now . . . at the scene of my ultimate triumph.”

As God is my witness,
Linus thought, entranced,
I can’t think of a thing to say.

“Moo-ha-ha-ha!” The laughter, which startled the hell out of them, got deeper and villainy-er. “Moo-ha-haaaaa! I—ack! Graaa-uk! Uk! Uk-uk!” Edward coughed, then rubbed l’il Éowyn on his throat like a poultice. “Sorry. I’ve been holding that in—”

“Your entire life, I think,” Linus finished, triply freaked out.

“Yes, possibly,” he admitted. “No need to hold anything in any longer. Not now. Now that we’ve succeeded. Now that we’ve moved you to act. L’il Éowyn counseled patience, and in the end, it was rewarded. All this . . .” He gestured to the gloom-shrouded computers, the chilly atmosphere, the minions lurking out of sight, watching and waiting to see who won. “She told me how to fool you.”

“Fool her?” Linus yelped. “It took Hailey about ten seconds to figure out you were the bad guy. After she realized
I
wasn’t the bad guy. And also after . . .”
Making out for a while,
he’d been about to add, then decided against it. “And Hailey was right . . . it’s obvious. Of course the bad guy’s in the IT department! You spy on what we’re doing on our computers—”

“You’re not supposed to surf Rotten Tomatoes or ESPN or update your Facebook on company time,” Edward whined.

“—so you can rat us out like, I dunno, Nazi Germany or whatever—”

“The Nazis were into animal conservation, and they were anti-tobacco. And they came up with the Volkswagen.”

Momentarily thrown (
Really? The Volkswagen?)
, Linus plunged ahead. “And when you’re not spying, you’re sneaking around and sitting in judgment because we keep crashing the network but we don’t know why, and no matter what sort of help we need, you pretty much stamp
No
on everything, and of course you see everything, you know everything. You control the information!”

Hailey was staring at him.

“Wow,” he said, surprised. “I guess I’ve got some repressed anger at the IT guys.”

“Think so?”

“Edward, I’m sorry, you didn’t deserve all that vitriol. Probably. God, the stress of—”

“God is dead! Only the IT department can help you now.”

“It’s just that sort of attitude that gets you in trouble with HR,” she warned. “As I said during your last disciplinary action, telling employees God is dead and that your department is all the God they need in their cringing pathetic lives is not appropriate workplace behavior. We’ve got a really easygoing CEO, but even she thinks telling people you’re the only God they need is uncool.”

“You are living a lie!” L’il Éowyn went flying as Edward abruptly stood. “Hiding behind your paper identity, when you owe the world your gifts!”

“The only thing I owe the world are taxes and, possibly, children. And then, of course, more taxes.” She turned to Linus. “My mother always said we should replace ourselves, kid-wise, and move on. So I think we—”

“Okay, whatever you want,
please
don’t take your eyes off the villain,” Linus begged. “He is
freaking
me
out
.”
Linus had never before sensed such overwhelming evil from a single person. Sure, everybody knew the IT guys were creepy, asocial weirdos who spent far too much time staring into screens of any sort. And, yeah, you didn’t ever want to meet one in a dark alley. Or cross one. Or engage with one in any social setting, ever. But Edward’s sheer malevolence was more than unsettling. He was a generally scary—

“I have made you great, It Girl!”

—nut job.

“And in return I and all my brethren are treated with thinly veiled contempt!”

“Then I apologize,” Hailey said in a tone that was frightening in its pleasantness. “I had no intention of veiling my contempt at all.”

“You shut us off from society, cast us off from the world! We’re cut off from the rest of the world not just physically but psychologically! We have nothing to do but fester and—”

“Go insane?” Linus guessed.

“Well, yes. Like mushrooms,” he admitted. “Evil mushrooms who can run a network from anywhere on the planet.”

“Oh, please. You guys get off on being different. You take pride in it. We don’t cut you off; you guys do it all on your own. You isolate yourselves; it’s your nature. And don’t get me started on your idiotic Help Desk Muppets!”

Edward gasped so hard Linus wondered if the man was having a heart attack. He shook a trembling finger in Hailey’s direction. “Judas!”

“Actually, Judas means
praised
and
admired
. So, yeah. Hailey’s definitely a Judas.”

Hailey was rubbing her forehead. “Please stop sticking up for me now. Edward, you and any other hacktivists you’ve hidden back there will cease and desist looking for bad situations and making them worse so I, or the National Guard, eventually have to intervene. Then—”

“What’s a hacktivist?” Linus asked.

“A trendy term for cowardly sneaky trespasser.”

Edward was rubbing his forehead in a gesture identical to Hailey’s. “Yes, that’s . . . that’s one I can’t defend. There can be no denying it’s sneaky of us,” he admitted.

“Edward, here’s how it is. I’m going to continue living my life, and if I’m running around doing the job of a cop or a firefighter or just working on annual reviews, it’s my own business and none of yours. And you? You’re going to jail.

“I don’t know what you did to the school bus, and how many other ‘accidents’ you’ve been responsible for to encourage me to step up, but you can be sure you won’t be doing anything like that
ever again
. You will turn yourself in. You will confess. You will
not
take a plea bargain. You will go to jail for quite some time. You will behave; you will forget you ever dreamed the dreams of super villains.”

“Why?” he asked, and Linus was afraid: it was a reasonable question. There was no proof. There were only Hailey’s hunches. Edward didn’t have to admit anything to anyone. He needn’t have confessed what he did to Hailey and Linus. He’d
wanted
to, which wasn’t the same thing. Linus doubted Edward would just stop. Why would he, when it was getting him what he wanted?

Even worse, would this lead to a smackdown between the superhero and the villain, an ultimate battle the likes of which the world had never seen and, also, wouldn’t have much interest in? Did he want such a tired cliché to happen right in the middle of Ramouette’s IT department?

What would the consequences be, especially with the company picnic coming up in less than two weeks? Would factions be further splintered? Would Hailey get fired for employing a super villain? Would the super villain bring a wrongful termination suit against Ramouette? Would the state of Minnesota’s department of dislocated workers get involved, guaranteeing hundreds of lost man hours? He foresaw entire square miles of paperwork ahead, and was afraid.

“Why?” Edward asked again. “Why stop now when you’re so close to accepting what you are? When you’re almost ready to understand that—”

“Don’t,” Linus warned.

“—with great—”

“If you say
with great power comes great responsibility
, I will do something terrible,” Hailey warned. “More terrible than I already had in mind, I mean. And if you don’t turn yourself in now, today, you will never recover from what I’ll do to you.”

“Why?” Edward asked, sounding curious.

“Because I’ll do things to you I won’t be able to take back. For starters, I’ll dissemble and eat your entire server, right now. The whole thing. Every bite. I’ll get it
all
down, Edward. You won’t be able to stop me; I could break your arm with one hand while smashing up the hard drive with the other. I’ve never actually eaten a fan before, and the server’s got a good one. You need them to keep the tech cool.

“The more I’ll eat, the stronger I’ll get. The stronger I’ll get, the more I’ll pull a
Hailey smash
all over this department, your car, your home. Even if you’ve backed it all up somewhere else, this is your baby. We all know it. It’s actual, physical tech you will never get back. Tech I’ll convert to energy and use to, I don’t know, have sex for a week without stopping, with Linus here. That’s what will happen to your Precious. I’ll use it to have sex. And you won’t have it anymore.”

“
Tons
of sex!” Linus added.

“And that,” she added, watching all the color fall out of Edward’s face, “that’s just the first thing to pop into my head. I’ll spend days thinking about how to fuck you up. Weeks.
Years.
”

It broke him. Linus saw it at once. It wasn’t the threat. Not even the threat of more threats. It was her face and her tone. She had looked sorry; she had also sounded genuinely sad when she spoke of doing things she couldn’t take back. Like she knew what it was like. Like she had experience with being fucked with, and was sad because she knew the march of events was inevitable.

It broke him, and he agreed to everything.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

“Toldja,” The Old Coot said, watching as the Savage police hauled a cuffed and raving Edward to a jail cell far, far away.

“Inevitable,” Audrey the Receptionist agreed. “The second time he told me the only god I should pray to was the server god, I figured he was bound for, I dunno, prison, or the bottom of the Mississippi, or one of Hailey’s sensitivity training seminars. Some wretched fate that would make him pray for death. He must have done something more evil than usual to get you up in his face like that,” Audrey noted. “What, did he call you out about being It Girl?”

For a second Hailey couldn’t breathe. She actually doubted her ears: Had Aud the Rec really said what she thought she had? She stole a glance at Linus, who looked remarkably serene.

“That’s it, isn’t it?” The Old Coot asked, observing Hailey’s frozen expression. “What’d you do, threaten to eat his tech? If I was It Girl, that’s what I would have done. Actually, I would have trussed him with barbed wire until he looked like an insane hedgehog, then made him watch while I ate allllll his back-ups.”

“How—How—I—How?”

“Are you kidding?” The Old Coot looked at Audrey, who was slowly shaking her head. “Is she kidding?”

“’Fraid not. That’s the extent of the cloud this woman walks around in.”

Hailey knew she sounded idiotic but was unable to stop. “There’s not—I don’t understand—You couldn’t—”

“Seriously with this?” Audrey the Receptionist asked, incredulous. “For God’s sake, you leap out two-story windows and are constantly seen eating things that would kill anybody else. There’s a bus crash or whatever, and suddenly you remember you have to race home and feed your nonexistent cat, and then while you’re feeding the cat we all know you don’t have, someone mysteriously saves the lives of a dozen first graders. Then you come back looking like you’ve been—I dunno—shoving buses off railroad tracks? Of course you’re It Girl! Or a super villain. But we thought you were in on it.”

“In on what?” Linus asked. He figured he could get away with it, being new. And Hailey looked so shocked, he was worried she might pull a Linus and faint. Black out, rather. Fainting was for sissies. He took her hand and she clutched at him with panicky fingers.

“Well. We don’t talk about it so much, but we all know you’re It Girl. We try to look out for you. And in return we figured you’ve been looking out for us, getting us all those awesome paid holidays, keeping the boss happy so she’s not here trying to get people to practice broomball with . . .” The Old Coot turned to Linus. “Basically Hailey here keeps the
human
in
human resources
. We thought you thought we knew that.”

Astonished silence from Hailey. The Old Coot and Audrey the Receptionist traded glances, then shrugged. “Either way,” Audrey said, “we’ve been watching out for you. We know you don’t have a life except for”—she waved a hand, vaguely encompassing Ramouette’s offices—“this. And now, maybe”—waving a hand at Linus—“that. So the least we can do is cover for you.”

“Why?” Hailey burst out. Linus was startled—and moved—to see her eyes were brimming with tears. “I’m never—You guys always—And it’s not like I—”

“Hailey, jeez.” Audrey sighed, giving her a quick, one-armed hug. “We
live
here. Our families
live
here. And you’re here, too—you could live anywhere in the world. You could be driving anybody else crazy. But you’re here. Driving
us
crazy.”

The Old Coot nodded. “That means a lot.”