Finally, after what seemed a small lifetime, the thundering of metallic death quieted. Into my ear, Mueller whispered, “Is that peaches?”
It took my brain a second to realize he was asking about my shampoo. “Apricot,” I whispered back, then coughed industrial dust into his shirt.
“I knew it was something like that. You okay, uh…”
I suddenly realized I’d never told him my name. He hadn’t asked. “Tessa.”
“You okay, Tessa?”
The absurdity of the notion that we’d almost died in a massive factory failure on my first morning and he didn’t even know my name, mixed together with the adrenaline and shock, produced a fit of laughter that rolled up from my chest. Mueller got caught up in it, and we became one tangled mess of hysterically laughing survivors huddled beneath a concrete slab, surrounded by a sea of metal and dust. It took many long, breathless minutes to subside, and then we both fell into coughing fits as subsequent deep breaths filled our lungs with industrial dust.
We lay there together, unmoving, for a quiet eternity until I felt something hard jabbing me in the thigh. I bit my lip to keep the laughter from starting all over again, then calmly asked, “Mueller, is that a wrench in your pocket, or…?”
“Huh?” He groped with one big paw, finding my butt for a long second before he said, “Oops. Sorry.” Not that he looked sorry. A second later, his sly amusement blinked into shocked sadness as he pulled out the biggest screwdriver I’d ever seen. His voice was reedy with grief and strain as he exclaimed, “Winona!”
“Careful!” I warned, at the same moment as he sat up and slammed his head into the platform above.
He swore loudly, more animalistic than real words, then ducked out of the overhang and began flipping through bits on the omnitool. Several of them were broken. Others looked melted. Mueller cradled the thing in his arms like a puppy who’d gotten hit by a car.
“Um, I don’t mean to be, you know, mean, or anything,” I said, trying to be gentle. “But shouldn’t we get out of here? Assess the damage? Something?”
Rage ground his teeth together. He slipped the tool through an unused belt loop on his jeans like a sheriff holstering his gun and stood up. With one big paw, he helped me do the same. Then he pointed up the staircase. “I need you to climb up there. Three or four steps up, there’s a giant red button marked ‘shutdown.’ Go push it.”
I nodded without saying anything. His rage seeped out of every pore, oozing across the air like the dust still obscuring my view of anything besides the two of us. Nonetheless, he hoisted me up onto the platform like a perfect gentleman. I scurried up the stairs on legs that felt like jell-o. Just as he said, a button as big as my fist awaited me on the central, load-bearing pole. I pushed it, and the sound of the other machines abruptly disappeared, replaced by the ugly blare of a warning alarm. Red light splashed across the dust, making it glow as if really infused with Mueller’s rage.
A voice from the far end of the factory shouted, “Mueller? What happened?”
He didn’t answer. More shouts, more questions in more voices, all female. I heard heavy thuds and clanks from below, but I gave him a few minutes to himself before I descended back into the dust cloud.
“What’s the point of a damn alarm if the morons are going to run at it instead of away?” he growled to himself. He muttered a lot I couldn’t understand as he paced the clear space between broken machinery bits. I sat on the platform, watching him, waiting for a new order so I didn’t interrupt his process.
Finally, though his anger hadn’t seemed to diminish in the slightest, he waved me over. “There’s a way out over here.”
I hopped off the concrete and followed him. The Ogre hadn’t completely fallen apart; some big pieces remained whole and upright, and it was over one of these that we climbed to get out. As he helped me down, I squeezed his arms in a gentle, platonic way and murmured, “At least we’re alive.”
“I’m gonna catch hell for this. We’ll be shut down all day, possibly all week. The new soda products were scheduled to release on Friday, but we won’t be able to hit quota since I now have to flush all the lines and start over. I’m going to have to examine every effing machine before I can turn it on, and then we’ll have to junk run them to make sure the products are clear. Damn it!”
The dust was just as thick on the other side, so I pulled the top of my shirt up to cover my nose and mouth. “If you need any help…” I shrugged. “I’ll have no idea what I’m doing, but if you need an extra set of hands…?”
He shook his head, surveying the damage from the outside. “I’ll just call my whole team in. They’ll bitch about it, so I may have to put my foot…uh, down.” He glanced at me. “If you could keep Robin and her miles of paperwork off the floor and out of my way, that’d be good.”
“Sure,” I said eagerly, without thinking. “What do you want me to tell her about all of this?” I opened my arms wide to encompass The Ogre.
“Tell her someone’s gonna die.” Then he growled between clenched teeth and amended, “Tell her I’ll file an official report by the end of the day. For now, the floor is closed. Anyone who isn’t maintenance is barred. Security needs to turn off all the passes… Aw, screw it. I’ll do it. If I leave it to them, it’ll be just maintenance who can’t get in.”
“You can do that?”
“A trained monkey could do it, if he knew how to code. Just gotta connect from my office.”
I eyed him. “Your office connects to security?”
He shrugged. “It wouldn’t need to if they knew how to do their jobs.”
Vaguely impressed - though that might have been the near-death shock - I made a quick time march off the factory floor. I didn’t really like the idea of leaving him behind with the rubble, just in case it tried to kill him again, but I also didn’t relish the thought of staying there. I asked one of the women outside in the hallway to keep an ear out for him, then looked for Robin. Unlike what seemed to be every other employee in the factory, she wasn’t milling around outside the fire doors gossiping about what was going on. She was upstairs, at her desk, her knuckles white on the phone pressed to her ear.
“No, sir, I know,” she said into the phone, her voice tight. “This meeting is very important to her. If she was available, I know she would absolutely answer your questions. But like I said, she’s unavailable at the moment. No, sir. Yes, sir. I understand that, sir. I know I sound young, but that doesn’t mean…” She trailed off as the man on the other end spoke over her, loudly enough I could hear the echo of his baritone from across the room.
When I saw tears fill her eyes, I trotted to her desk and whispered, “Can I help?”
She shook her head, but the whites of her eyes said differently. “I understand, Mr. Windchase. Can you confirm the time of the meeting for me, please? Friday at eleven. Yes, sir, I will relay the message. Maysie will be here to greet you, I promise. Yes, sir. Have a nice day, sir.”
She hung up and buried her face in her arms. “I hope to all things holy and haloed that Maysie is here on Friday,” she muttered, her voice muffled. “Or he will burn me to cinders with his death glare.”
“Who’s he?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me. That, and I wanted to know who to hate when he showed up at eleven on Friday.
“They call him the Chisel, because he breaks down a person’s defenses one precise strike at a time. He’s the representative for—” Her pale eyes peeked at me from the nest of her arms. “For a potential investor. Nothing you need to worry about.” She jotted a note on her desk calendar: Farraday Finders?
I had nothing to say to that. It irritated me, but it was, after all, my first day. So I got down to it, filling her in on the accident. I did my best to stall her, forcing her to help me complete all the incident reports and extra new hire paperwork to buy Mueller time to get things done. Maybe I shouldn’t have; I worried about that after the first twenty minutes, but I also couldn’t deny the sense of loyalty that comes
from a shared near-death experience. Besides, in spite of his crass, immature demeanor, he was the first person who had treated me like a normal human being in weeks. That would probably change once he learned about my ex and my ex’s new girlfriend - he seemed exactly the type who drooled over Serabella Angelique - but I could enjoy the few days before the inevitable perspective switch.
Robin, on the other hand, proved to be just as uppity as my first impression suggested. After all, I’d almost been killed by falling machinery, and she still made me start on the file room.
“I will not let everything fall apart while Maysie is away,” she said as she pointed me to the file room door. “I expect you here for the rest of the week,” she ordered. “The state of the floor doesn’t affect the files.” She practically slammed the door in my face, leaving me to the files and the thing that was going to pay my bills for a while.
And holy hell, were there a lot of files. Every wall of the room was lined with cabinets, some made of wood, some of metal, all of them covered in stacks and stacks of files, which were in turn coated in a thick layer of dust. A table in the center was likewise burdened. Even the floor housed piles that came up to my waist.
I stared at it all dumbly for a minute or two, trying to decide where to start. The room needed a serious airing out, but the only windows were high on the outer wall, and the only way up there would be to stand on the table, leap onto a cabinet, and then finagle them open. Except that would also require I clear a path, and I was afraid to move anything for fear of causing an avalanche.
I was flipping through the top file on a stack on the table - Cara Redmund, dated 1985 - when a whooshing sound filled the room. As I carefully maneuvered around piles in search of the source, I heard a rush of air and then a thunk. That helped me pinpoint it so I only needed to halve a pair of piles in the corner to uncover a pneumatic tube. Inside the chamber, I found an orange canister. Inside the canister was an industrial-sized walkie-talkie, already on.
“I am a rock god trapped in a programmer’s body,” Mueller’s voice crackled through the walkie.
I pushed the button on the side and said into it, “Should I call you Jimi or Steven?”
“Damn it. I didn’t think it was there yet.”
“So, Keith,” I said, not bothering to hide the grin he couldn’t see. “To what do I owe this present in vacuum tube?”
“If you think this is a present, your ex must have really sucked at buying you things. That why you left him?”
Oh, good. The awkward hadn’t taken the day off, after all. “Absolutely. I was tired of getting power tools for my birthday.”
“If you were tired of it, then he wasn’t using the right tools.”
How did he manage to make everything dirty? I wasn’t sure if I felt offended or amused. “What’s the walkie for?”
“Talking. Guess you can’t tell smarts from looking at a person, after all.”
I rolled my eyes. “Ha ha. You know what I mean.”
“I’ve seen that file room. You need a way to call for help if it buries you alive.”
“Why, Mueller,” I said, affecting a Southern accent, “are you worried about little old me?”
The walkie crackled. “You? I just don’t want to get called in after hours to save your ass again.”
“I saved yours first,” I argued.
“Pretty sure you couldn’t keep your hands off me. Flattering, but hardly saving my ass.”
“You keep telling yourself that.”
When no rebuttal arrived immediately, I set the walkie on the table and flipped through a couple more files. Unfortunately, there was no order I could discern in the mess. But at least that would mean more work for me. So long as I didn’t almost die every morning I showed up to do it, that made me happy.
“Robin wants to say something,” Mueller’s voice crackled into the deadened air of the file room again.
“Tessa?” Robin’s voice replaced his. “I’m sorry I was such a bitch. Stress, you know? Anyway, you need to get yourself checked out after the accident, make sure your lungs are okay, or whatever. Our nurse is off today, so you need to see your own doctor. And make sure you check the box that says it’s a work-related accident, or you’ll totally mess up my paperwork. ‘Kay?”
“Sure thing,” I said into the walkie, but it was still crackling with static.
“There, happy?” Robin’s voice said. “She’s not going to be here that long, and I don’t know why I have to be nice to everybody all the time, anyway. I’ve got more important things to worry about than a temp’s feelings.”
Mueller cleared his throat. “You gotta release the button so she can answer you.”
“Oh, sh—” The walkie went dead.
I sighed to myself, then pushed my own walkie’s button and said, “I get it, Robin. I’ll make sure to see my doctor on my way home.”
“I’m required to say that if you feel at all incapable of being here for the remainder of the day, you may leave now to do so.” She didn’t sound happy. In fact, she sounded like a teenager who’d just gotten in a lot of trouble.
“I’m good,” I said, smirking. Exactly how much weight did Mueller get to throw around as lead maintenance tech? “I’ll go after work. I want to get a start on these files.”
Mueller’s voice growled at me again. “Remember, if you get buried and don’t tell me immediately, I’ll leave you there until morning. So keep the walkie with you. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Lunch at noon.”
We didn’t have lunch at noon. We didn’t have lunch at all, mostly because Mueller was busy bellowing at The Ogre for making such a giant mess of his floor, and at his undertechs to take no prisoners. The fire doors wouldn’t open for anyone but them, but I could still hear him through those heavy, air-tight suckers. I ate lunch all alone in a break room stocked with six kinds of muffins, an assortment of taffies, brittles, and chocolates, and a giant vat of gumdrops. It also held ham sandwiches, which I ate half of to be a good adult and then stuffed myself with chocolate chip muffins. I washed it down with fruit punch masquerading as a health potion and got back to work.
By five o’clock, I was coughing so hard and blowing dust from my nose so often, I figured it was a good thing I was going to the doctor. I tried to say goodbye to Mueller, but there was no answer on the walkie. Lots of reassurance there, should I actually ever be lost in file avalanche. I considered leaving a note on his desk, but then reconsidered immediately. We had only just met that morning, and I didn’t want to seem clingy. That would be a clingy thing to do, right? I ignored my weird urge to let him know my whereabouts and to wish him luck with The Ogre and left for the day.
I didn’t currently have a primary care doctor in town, having only recently moved back after a decade away. Since I wasn’t about to wade through the joys of insurance right that second, I stopped in at the urgent care center for a quick check. Given that it was Monday at the end of the work day, the place was pretty busy. I waited for an hour, cowering in a corner with a magazine in front of my face as a germ shield. Given that it was also attached to the emergency room at the hospital, I got to listen to three kids come in with broken arms, two toddlers who stuffed something up their noses, and a variety of off-season coughs, sniffles, and one really scary asthma attack. Pretty much everyone got to go ahead of me. Normally, that would probably have irritated me. After catching my mom and Bob…well, I was happy to be out of the house as long as possible.
Sometime around seven, with only me and a couple people left in the waiting room, an ambulance arrived. The rush I expected from the nurses didn’t happen. Instead, they wheeled the person through the now quiet ER waiting room, past the long row of windows separating it from the urgent care room, and barely said a word. Anything I had expected from many, many years of watching hospital melodramas didn’t happen. No iv bags. No shouting or jostling to be the first on the job. Just a quiet, focused staff that wheeled the gurney down the corridor and out of
sight.
Feeling a little disappointed - and a lot guilty for feeling disappointed - I returned to my magazine.
“Tereza?” a young nurse called not a moment later. I got up and crossed the room to join her at the door to the exam rooms just as a second ambulance arrived. The nurse was as curious as I was, so we paused to watch them wheel in a second gurney. Then she led me back, only to stop at the rear desk. A familiar-looking woman with black hair sat behind it, reviewing something on a computer.
“Hey, Gina,” the first nurse said. “A second one just came in. Do you mind doing her workup so I can go talk to Chase?”
The woman behind the desk didn’t look pleased, but she nodded and took my chart, anyway. “If it’s like the others, he won’t be able to tell you anything.”
“Still. It’s so weird. I’ll be right back.”
Without looking at me, the black-haired woman came out from behind the desk and walked me through the usual intake shuffle. Weight: Thirty pounds over where I’d like to be. Height: Still shorter than the rest of my family, but a respectable 5’8. She checked my temp and my oxygen level and then led me to an exam room where she checked my blood pressure. It wasn’t until she opened my chart to record the information that she finally glanced at me. The focused way she stared at my chart made my stomach gremlin roll over. She recognized me. Awesome.
I prepped for questions about my suddenly-famous ex or our divorce - the two topics nobody could seem to stop talking about - but she surprised me. “Tessa?” she asked, and I suddenly realized where I’d seen her before.
“Gigi? I didn’t know you were still in town. How are you?”
She broke out that smile that had melted all the boys’ hearts in high school. “Pretty good. Swamped, but that’s not unusual. How are you?”
“Fine,” I answered reflexively. “Well, you know, I’m here, so not perfect, but life could be worse. I was in an accident at work today, but it didn’t kill me so I call that a win.”
One Good Wand Page 8
