Victor shook his head and crossed his arms.
Ron frowned with annoyance. “Have a seat, Vic. I can’t stand it when you hover all ominous like that. Are we having a storm tonight or something?”
“You tell me,” Victor replied grumpily. He leaned forward, fingers splayed across the manila file lying atop Ron’s desk calendar. It was closed, so he couldn’t read the contents. This annoyed Victor and fed his hubris. “What’s up?” he asked. “Or do I even want to know?”
Ron lit a fresh Havana and sat back in his all-leather, office-recliner-chair-thingy. It was one of those orthopedic deals that was supposed to straighten out your back without you doing anything. It had eaten up a good deal of the annual budget, Victor knew. Like the Havanas.
Ron sighed.
Good god, this was worse than bad.
Victor played with the paperweight weighing invoices, the one containing Dr. Pretorius’s mermaid homunculus, turning her idly while she scowled up at his careless handling of her aspic. “Spit it out, Ron!” Victor said. “I don’t have all night!”
Ron puffed. “This is...sensitive.”
“Adam hasn’t been fighting with the wife again...?”
“No, no.” Ron dismissed that by waving away a cloud of smoke and sat forward. “Nothing like that. He’s been good as gold of late. Elsa’s even getting him to do the company barbecue this year. He’s coming along just fine. Should be over that whole pyrophobia thing in no time.”
Victor touched the file again. “So...?”
Ron’s expression twisted this way and that, facial tug-of-war. Finally he gave in and spat it out. “It’s about...Jack, actually.”
“Jack? What’s Jack done now?”
“Nothing antisocial! It’s just, well...that was the boss man I just spoke to, and he’s decided we need a turnover. I mean, the joint’s making no profit, so we’re in for some big budget cuts. It’s like with Wal-Mart—you save through the employment angle—”
Victor flinched, thinking of Jack’s certain fate as a Door Greeter at Wal-Mart if this gig fell through, though, admittedly, he was getting a little tired of cleaning up his messes. He set his jaw and stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his lab coat. He was almost afraid to go on. But go on he must, he knew. It wasn’t in his nature to give up on anything. It was his job—nay, his duty—as Assistant Manager here.
“And what do these new employment angles have to do with Jack?” he hedged.
Ron made a helpless hey-it-ain’t-my-fault gesture. “We gotta let him go, Vic.”
“Let Jack go,” Victor intoned. “Are you crazy?”
“No, Jack is.”
“He’s supposed to be.” He gave Ron his profile. “It’s what he gets paid for.”
“Boss man says the slasher craze is over. Big bug monsters are coming back. I ain’t arguing with him, are you?”
Not in this economy, Victor thought. He dropped his eyes, thoughts of Door Greeting in his immediate future flitting through his head like demonic sparrows.
“I’m really sorry, Victor.”
Yeah, sure.
Victor shook his head. Poor Jack. And to think he and Norman were getting along so well, too. “Just where do I come in on all this?”
Ron opened Jack’s file and flipped through it nervously. “I was hoping you’d...you know, sit him down and...”
“Serve him his papers,” Victor finished abruptly.
Ron painted on a painful smile.
“Ron—”
“Now, don’t start with me, Vic,” Ron snapped. “You tell me you want knowledge and power and the whole friggin’ Faustian package, want to replace God—”
“I never said I wanted to replace God, only that I knew what God felt like—”
“—and all that, and now you pull a face. What is it with you and responsibility? I’m starting to believe all the things your son has told me about you—”
“What’s that monster been saying about me?”
“Don’t matter.” Ron dismissed it all with another chop of his hand, sending the fumes of his cigar into Victor’s face. “All that matters is the bottom line. Focus, Victor, focus.”
Victor waved it away. Now he was really annoyed. Once he had been a god among men; now he was a stiff-necked paper pusher like all the other lowborn Neanderthals running this place into the ground. But that was the price to be paid for semi-retirement, he supposed.
“Can I count on you or not?” Ron said.
“I’m not personnel, but…I suppose.”
“Good.” Ron steepled his professionally manicured fingertips together. “The others do admire you—”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“—and look up to you, you know.”
“Wundervoll! Anything else?”
“Big bugs. Think big bugs. Are Them! up for retirement?”
“No.”
“Wasp Woman?”
“No.”
“Mothra?”
“No!” Christ on a cracker. Victor stormed out of Ron’s office, slamming the door behind him so hard the heavily leaded glass rang in its frame. He paused outside, steaming, staring at Ron’s name emblazoned in gold on the glass.
Oh, just drop it on Victor...Victor doesn’t mind. Everyone admires Victor.
Sure. Sometimes he really regretted working his way up to Assistant Manager. Overachiever, Victor thought, that’s me.
He heard a subhuman groan and turned to find its source. Kharis was limping down the corridor, headed right for him, his time card gripped tight in one overmittened hand. Victor pushed past him. “You’re late! You’ll need a swipe!”
Kharis dropped his card.
Victor swung around. “Not one click overtime!”
Kharis raised his fist slow-mo-like, and groaned out an Egyptian curse at him.
He didn’t care. Didn’t care that it would take the relic a good ten minutes to pick the time card up and another five to swipe the damned thing. He kept walking, sulking, his head down until the formaldehyde on his lab coat started to get to him.
Work had to be done. And he was the go-to guy, after all.
He took the stairs down to the lobby of the museum, stomping hard to let his presence be known to the few remaining employees on the floor. It was long after-hours and the main display room of the wax museum was empty save for two black-clad ushers snapping velvet snakes across the exhibit coves. They glanced up at Victor’s approach, then quickly averted their mascara-blackened eyes. The help wasn’t paid enough to talk to anyone.
Country western music was pouring out of hidden speakers in the ceiling in lieu of the usual low-key, decidedly unspooky soundtrack, trading one annoyance for another. Tim McGraw twanging through a wax museum at three in the morning was simply not a pretty thing to experience in a state of sobriety.
Victor stomped over to one of the ushers and tapped him on the shoulder.
The usher started, then looked at his companion as if seeking a way out of this.
Victor squinted through a growing headache at the little man. “You seen Jack?”
The usher looked dumbfounded by the question, as if he’d been asked to do advanced calculus in his head. Victor thought again of buying that cattle prod he’d seen on Amazon. He couldn’t help it; he did have a thing for electricity.
“Well?” Victor repeated, talking in a way a slow child of three or four, or even an online Nitwit, might understand. “Have. You. Seen. Jack?”
“Out, Victor,” came a soft, cultured voice from the next exhibit cove over. Victor turned in time to see Erik slide out on a crawler from under his pipe organ. He had a handful of tools in one hand and a mangling of unidentifiable parts and wires in the other. He groaned as he pulled himself up to his full seven-foot height. He was sweating profusely under his porcelain mask.
“Out?” Victor echoed as he wandered toward the man.
“Oui. Left fifteen, twenty minutes ago.” Erik dropped his useless parts in a crazed mechanical pile on the floor of his exh
ibit. Somehow, Victor doubted that old pipe organ was worth so much work to save, but if he knew Erik—and he thought he did—he could be damned obsessive about some things.
“Out where?” Victor asked.
Erik blotted his neck with the hem of his opera cloak and shrugged. “Monsieur Jack is a very strange one, eh?”
He checked his pocket watch. “Did he say when he’d be back?”
“Who is to know, mon ami?”
Not me, obviously, thought Victor.
“Thanks,” he said and turned away.
Some night this was turning out to be. Old home week on the funny farm, staff cuts and the return of the big bug craze. He thought about ringing Waspy—he knew the old girl would be abuzz with excitement if Victor offered her a job and got her out of that cheesy Vegas show she was doing, but they had a history and there was nothing worse than having to work in the same environment as your ex. Jesus Christ. He should have stayed in Geneva. He could have gotten tenure at Ingolstadt and kicked back and written a few anatomy books, maybe taken up fly-fishing in his retirement.
Larry was coming in the back door. He was wearing a Lakers tank top, hairy arms cradling a basketball to his flank. He saw Victor and smiled, a flare of white teeth in his unshaven face. “Yo, Vic, look sharp, man,” he said and flicked the ball.
Victor caught it and turned it idly in his hands as Larry jogged up. “Little one-on-one?” Larry asked. “Give you a handicap, man.”
“No, thanks.”
“Let you experiment on me if you win, dude.”
“I really don’t feel up to it tonight.”
“Yo, man. Whassup?”
Victor flicked the ball back at him. “Boss man’s letting Jack go.”
“Bummer,” he said and hung one long, befurred, ape-like arm companionably around Victor’s neck. “No one likes the bearer of bad news. Suppose Ron’s having you drop da bomb?”
“You know it.”
“Double bummer.” Larry walked him to the door. “You always the villain, man. Always the villain.”
“You seen Jack?”
“My bad. He and Vlad just left, man. Going for a couple after-work drinky-poos. You know those two lady-killers.”
“Yeah.”
“You really look like someone kicked your dog, man.”
“Life’s a bitch,” he answered Larry obliquely. “Jack the Ripper back as a Door Greeter at Wal-Mart.”
Victor was smoking an unfiltered Newport near the Dumpster of the museum when he had a revelation. He was ruminating over the fact that there was no smoking room in the employee’s lounge while Ron was busily eating up funding with orthopedic chair-thingies when he heard a commotion nearby. Fearful it might be Vlad’s lackey chasing rats, he picked up a small rock by his shoe and turned to glare into the darkness, trying to find a moving target. Torturing some small, helpless animal was just what he needed tonight. Better than a six-pack after a shitty long day.
A number of rats had trapped a small cat in the space between the Dumpster and the weedy green privacy fence that separated the wax museum from the adult video store next door. They did that sometimes—the prey turning the tables on the predator. Victor had even seen a couple of big brazen ones trap and kill a raccoon once. He’d tried to convince Ron that a Willard remake was just around the corner, but Ron had been stuck on serial killers at the time.
It gave him an idea. A good one
“No, Vic,” he told himself, throwing the rock at the rats. “An excellent idea.”
Victor was leaning against the wall next to Ron’s office when he stepped into the hallway and turned, locking up for the night. He looked surprised—and perhaps a tad worried. “Hey, Vic.”
Victor looked up. “Hey, Ron. How’s the back?”
“What?”
“You got all those fancy office toys. The back massage chair. They must be working.”
“Oh…yeah.” He gave Victor’s relaxed posture a nervous once-over. “Doin’ great. You get Waspy’s number?”
“Waspy wasn’t in.”
“And them?”
“Them?”
“Them!” He glared at Victor as if he had suddenly gone stupid.
Victor smiled and showed his pearly whites. He pushed his glasses up his long nose. “Actually, Ron, I have a better idea. It’s really something. We’ll get the joint out of the red in no time.”
Ron gave him a dubious glare. “Oh yeah? Impress me. Hell, if you can impress the boss man at this point, he’ll probably make you manager.”
“You think so?” Victor put his arm around Ron and started walking him down the hallway.
Ron laughed nasally like a jackass with a bad head cold. “Sure thing. But let’s be honest, Vic, I’m not likely to lose my job anytime soon. You’ve never had a decent idea in your life.”
Victor smiled good-naturedly. “That may be so, but just hear me out…it’s really funny. I think you’ll appreciate this.” And with that, Victor reached into the pocket of his lab coat and put the nose of the taser he’d bought off Amazon into Ron’s back and gently squeezed the trigger.
Ron did the electric boogaloo in the middle of the hallway while the sexy little device whirled and crackled and the faint odor of ozone and burning hair filled the air. Then he dropped like a University of Florida student at Victor’s feet and lay shivering with spent electricity.
Victor flicked the trigger with amusement. He wished he’d had these types of toys back in the day.
Down the hallway the darkness parted like a curtain and Victor saw eyes. A lot of them. Green and white and bright hellblazing red. Blinking eyes. Laughing eyes.
This was better than strip poker night and getting Vampira out of her dress.
The darkness down the hallway surged forward as one—a veritable tidal wave of menace. The employees of the museum slithered and wiggled and slouched and shambled forth, their leering, laughing eyes pinned to Ron’s prone form.
Ron mumbled, then floundered like a great fish out of water. One of his meaty hands reached out and clawed the evil green carpeting in the hallway as he slowly pulled himself into a safe corner. Except that in this funhouse of the dead and the damned, there were no safe corners. A sudden low-lying mist surrounded him, pressed in. Hands pawed at the air in front of his face. Knives, claws and teeth glinted in the dilated pupils of his eyes.
“It’s time you retired, Ron,” Victor told his boss, standing over him with a smirk. “The joint’s making no profit.”
The Creature scrabbled at Ron’s ankle with one slimy, beclawed flipper. The Bride tottered up to him, grinning at him as she bent forward, showing a lot of undead cleavage. Vlad’s wives crawled across the walls and ceiling like angry, chittering cockroaches. But despite it all, Adam made it there first like a walking brick shithouse, a Hulk-smash look on his pale, bluish face. He reached for Ron.
Ron screamed. Or tried to. But Victor’s son’s hand was like a cold, grey slab of meat, clutching Ron’s mouth closed and cutting off his cry of protest.
After tallying the receipts for the week, Victor sat back in Ron’s fancy orthopedic chair, sipped coffee from Ron’s engraved Best Boss Evah! mug, and lit up one of Ron’s Havanas. No more red. He patted the thick leather pouch, then went downstairs to tell the others the good news.
The museum was packed, so much so that Victor had to slide sideways through the crowds gathered twenty deep at all the exhibit coves. The soundtrack pouring down from the PA system was still decidedly unspooky, but the patrons didn’t seem to mind. They were too enthralled by the performance at Cove One.
Victor stopped and observed the performance with detached interest. After a week one would think the patrons would be tired of it by now, but some things never went out of style. Like torture. It was a hit for the Romans, after all.
Tonight Igor had Ron on the rack and was stretching out his troublesome back. The patrons oohed and aahed and whispered about how realistic the blood, crackling bones and cries of pain were, better than
the usual phony Hollywood stuff you saw in the movies.
Larry stopped and hung one furry arm about Victor’s neck. “You’re gonna love it, dude. We’ve even got rats to run all over him tonight.”
“Rats, huh?”
“You no fan of rats?”
“Could take ‘em or leave ‘em,” Victor said. “I think they’re overrated.”
“But one of ‘em’s Ben.” Larry grinned triumphantly, then turned, scowling at the performance. “Betcha didn’t know a human body could do angles like that.”
“Actually…yes, I did.”
“Oh right. You the anatomy man.” Larry nodded. “Just remember you working tomorrow.”
“Am I?” Victor said. He checked his calendar on the cell phone inside his pressed Italian sports jacket. “Amputation or electrocution?”
“It’s your bag, man. Whatever you think will make him scream.”
“I doubt the rats will make him scream.”
“A fiver says Ben will.”
“You’re on.”
PLAYING GAMES
Kerry G.S. Lipp
She’s staring at me and she won’t fucking stop.
I’m not bothering her. She shouldn’t even know that I’m around, that I’m in the room. And it’s my room, my house, anyways. But she won’t stop staring. She just sits there, in the corner, staring at me.
I’m just trying to play Xbox. I didn’t even invite her over. She just…showed up.
I bought a new game today to try and get her off my mind. She’s taken over my life and I wanted to a night to myself so I could be myself, so I could play and drink and check Facebook on my phone to chat about the game whenever it hits a load screen. But she won’t let me. She doesn’t speak; she just stares as if she can’t believe that I’m more interested the game than her.
Uh, newsflash, bitch. I’m saving the world from parasitic, carnivorous, bug-eyed aliens. What have you done for me lately?
I try to ignore her, but I can feel her eyes boring into the back of my head.
Fossil Lake II: The Refossiling Page 20
