LZR-1143: Within

by Bryan James

  Acknowledgements.

  I once worked in this building.

  I credit that life with inspiring my love of horror and horrible, horrible things.

  So, this is dedicated to anyone working a depressing, soul-crushing job.

  May the zombies come for you first and eat quickly.

  And thanks to Evan for ensuring that my soul-crushing hit the right note.

  LZR-1143: Within

  A Novella

  of the

  LZR-1143 Series

  By:

  Bryan James

  Published by Bryan James.

  Copyright 2012, Bryan James.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events or places is purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

  LZR-1143: Within

  There are more than three hundred water bottling facilities on the Eastern Seaboard alone.

  Each facility is privately owned and operated, controlled by boards of directors in distant cities with a distant appreciation for the circumstances that allow these plants to operate.

  They are staffed by local employees, with management often dispatched from the corporate centers in Chicago, Atlanta, and other massive corporate hubs.

  They employ an average of two hundred workers per plant. An average of seventy-five line operators, fifty machinists, thirty quality control specialists, ten marketing and branding engineers and specialists, ten accountants, ten managers, fourteen janitorial staff, and one operational security manager. In other words, one person responsible for controlling the security of each plant that processes tens of thousands of bottles of drinking water for tens of thousands of people.

  Every day.

  Of every week.

  Power plants, airports, train stations, and even bus stations have more robust security than bottled water facilities. Even reservoirs and waste water plants have local government buy-in and oversight, motivated by a belief that drinking water and water supplies are inviolable and vital to local and national security.

  But bottled water is a business. And regulations kill business.

  Or so it was said.

  In each of these plants, the single security officer may watch several monitors with half an eye or stroll lazily through the facility. He might watch the machines form the bottles and roll mechanically to the labeling machine. He would stroll past hundreds of workers, recognizing a few, and disregarding new or unfamiliar faces. He could absently observe the massive machines funnel purified water from huge vats in the ceilings into clear plastic bottles. He may yawn, having seen it several hundred times already.

  Case by case, they roll out, passing under the heavy-lidded eyes of quality control specialists, whose job it is to ensure the labels are straight and the caps are sealed. They cannot check the quality of the water. There are too many, and they are not, after all, chemists.

  Case by case, these bottles are sealed and labeled and loaded on trucks.

  The single security officer returns to his office, and sits down.

  Case by case, every day, the bottles of water move across the country.

  In New York City, on just one of those days, it is early morning.

  It is, in fact, a beautiful morning.

  The daily accumulation of chemical and mineral particulates that commonly and routinely form smog above the city have not yet had the chance to aggregate into a cohesive cloud. The sun has not risen so far in the sky to yet produce the oppressive heat that this day will bring.

  On this beautiful morning, the airport is not so busy that a delivery truck carrying pallets of mineral water is not unduly delayed in its scheduled arrival to Terminal A. Flashing a bright yellow badge and getting waved through the checkpoint by a yawning security contractor who barely looks up from his newspaper, the truck parks in the loading dock, emitting the familiar high-pitched beeps as it reverses. A hefty man emerges from the cab, moving quickly to lift the back gate and offload his wares.

  The pallets are disbursed amongst the vendors, their single contract with this DHS-approved supplier making deliveries easy and fast. The bottles are divided and moved to the stores, as they replace older supplies that are dwindling in the heat that has lasted far too long into the fall.

  Inside the terminal, the volume of daily travelers slowly increases as the day moves on. Passengers that had brought their own water, having been forced to relinquish their own supplies, pass through security and purchase the newer bottles, knowing that they will likely be met with overworked flight attendants and an undersupply of liquid in the air. They think nothing of purchasing a water bottle from the vendors inside the airport, just as they would think nothing of purchasing a water bottle from a grocery store.

  As the day moves on, these travelers wait in lines to board their planes. They talk, and laugh, and sigh loudly at delays. They yell at flight attendants and they walk listlessly in the terminal. A father of two boards a plane bound for Omaha, destined for a short business trip and a return that night.

  A young man waits anxiously to board the plane to visit his father in Denver. An older woman in a severe business suit stares unrelentingly at her smart phone, willing the time to go by faster, for life to pass just a tad quicker. The travelers have places to be, and people to meet. They have purpose.

  Unbeknownst to these travelers, to any but a select few, on this day of this month of this year, their water has a purpose as well. The water bottles purchased from this airport board countless planes, bound for countless destinations within the United States and abroad: nearly one flight every sixty-four seconds, to be precise.

  The delivery driver whistles tunelessly as he finishes his delivery, and returns to his warehouse, scheduled for more than eighty-seven more deliveries that day, mostly to large grocery stores and big-box consumer outlets.

  And in every state of the union, drivers in similar trucks, dressed in similar uniforms, and whistling similar songs, deliver water from the same company to more than one hundred other airports.

  In New York City, the sun rises just slightly, and the day starts to heat up.

  ***

  Louis groaned as he typed, willing the digits on the clock to move faster, to please change. But the damnable red digits hung stubbornly and cruelly, smiling in their own way at his pain.

  Dear Valued Customer,

  I regret to inform you that BankFirst cannot reverse the $75.00 overdraft charge assessed to your account for your debit card purchase dated September 7, in the amount of $0.45 at Gas and Gulp, Trenton. Please refer to your membership agreement for further details.

  Thank you for being a member of the BankFirst team. We value your business.

  Sincerely yours,

  Louis

  Online Customer Service Representative 09827

  04:21, PST

  Louis cringed as he filled the amount, date and location fields in the pre-filled form, shuddering as another part of his soul died a small, undignified death, screaming in the hollows of his conscience.

  Get out.

  Get out.

  Get out.

  He clicked in the appropriate fields, proofing the message once so that the quality control pricks in San Francisco wouldn’t send him an annoying email the next morning. He hovered his mouse over the bright green “Send” button momentarily, considering for the thousandth time, deleting the pre-drafted, pre-cleared response, and writing his own.

  Dear Customer,

  Get a new bank. Seriously. How can you put up wit
h a $75.00 overdraft charge on a $0.45 purchase? What, were you buying a stick of gum? A half bottle of soda? What the fuck can you buy with $0.45 these days? A perforated condom? A four day old hot dog? Get your shit straight and drop this bank like a bad damn habit. Peace out.

  Love always and tenderly … to your mom.

  Love, Louis

  But he didn’t. Because he had rent to pay. And a girlfriend to entertain. And a yappy little dog who vomited in his shoes.

  So he kept coming in. He kept reading the same outraged emails, and he kept pushing back the same canned responses.

  He glanced up once from his screen, rubbing the back of his neck with a sweaty palm, and sighing loudly, as he frequently did in the bright, soul-sucking glow of his cheap Taiwanese computer screen.

  One window. That’s all he’d need to feel human. Just one. Something to wander by during a break. Something to stare at in boredom. Yes, he would be staring out into the night, but the knowledge that outside this building, someone, somewhere was living a life—any life—would have been nice.

  But no.

  He was here.

  Without windows.

  Without hope.

  Louis worked the night shift at an online customer service hub in Harbor Island, Washington. On duty from eight PM to five AM, he and his shift were responsible for delivering responses to email inquiries from customers across the country. They were one of the few stations that hadn’t been outsourced to India or the Philippines, and they survived on xenophobia alone. Focus groups conducted a year ago by special “efficiency consultants” had revealed the likelihood of a nine percent customer attrition among Southeastern states in the face of expanded fees if they could not speak to a “real American” when they called or wrote to complain. So the bank did the American thing. They kept the jobs in the U.S., even the online jobs, and jacked their fees through the roof. Customer attrition to date was a mere two percent.

  Win for the bank.

  Loss for Louis, and for his will to live.

  He had survival down pat. But living … That wasn’t something he didn’t do. He knew how to bring home just enough money to feed his stupid, vomiting dog and pay for movies and take out Thai food and the too-high insurance for his crappy car. But he wasn’t the guy sky diving or jogging or having fun with friends at the pub. He wasn’t even the guy that finished college, or vocational school. He was the guy who got the crappy job he had because he had applied at the right time, and he clung to it like a miserable sinking life raft, halfway hoping that it would sink beneath him and give him a reason to swim away.

  Or sink to the bottom.

  He exhaled loudly and rubbed his eyes, glancing around one more time as if willing the building to change. Across the room, someone coughed, emphasizing the absurd size of the building that seemed to somehow mock, just by existing, his total insignificance.

  The hub was a massive, dark, windowless building. During the day shift, it employed more than five hundred people, all within one gigantic, cubicle-filled room. The building was a gigantic rectangle the size of three football fields, and if you stood against the east wall, you could stare across the entire expanse and make distant eye contact with anyone standing against the western side. Four and a half foot cubicles obscured all but the heads of the diligent workers, and fluorescent lights bathed the space, day and night. Windows, deemed a security risk and a distraction, were nonexistent. The only inlets of daylight were through the front door, and only when it was open, and the small skylight in the depressing employee lounge upstairs. Due to the secure nature of their accounts, and in what Louis considered a drastic overreaction to an incident of data theft by a former employee, the remainder of the building was locked down and closed out. No external internet, no personal phone lines, and no television. Terminals that networked to the internal systems and the bank’s own websites glowed around him, most flickering the floating screen savers and scrolling marquees so common in large companies.

  It was a dreary, drab and utterly depressing place to work, but in an era when Washington’s unemployment rate exceeded twelve percent, it was a place of employment. So Louis came to work, every night.

  “Yo, Louie, dude. This guy spent five grand on a strip club in Vegas, and now he’s emailing me from an IP address in Nevada, saying he didn’t do it. That he’s in New York. Nice, right? Something to be said for plausible deniability, right?”

  Louis raised his head, shaking his shaggy, oily hair out of his face and pushing his glasses back up his nose. He glared at the young man hanging over the edge of his gray cubicle wall, ear and nose rings glittering in the dull fluorescence of the overhead lights.

  Cam leaned back, drumming his hands energetically on the side of the cube walls as he smiled largely, his wide, pimpled face ebullient at discovering a scandal.

  “So?” said Louis, rendered soulless and humorless for the fiftieth time tonight. He punched “Send” absently, and the computer instantly pulled up the next message to be answered. A small clock in the upper right hand of the dull flat screen monitor reset to zero and began ticking off the seconds, timing his response rate for the next message. Louis sighed, scanning the text of the message.

  “So?” His voice was incredulous and plaintive. “Dude.”

  “We don’t get that much variety in here. This shit is awesome compared to … well, whatever you’re reading now. In fact, I bet you a can of pop that I can guess the subject of that email that just jammed your queue.” His face was excited and over caffeinated. Louis sighed again, waving his hand absently.

  “Sure Cam, whatever.” He read the text quickly, rolling his eyes as he did, knowing that Cam would be able to guess, and already fatigued by the hours of gloating that his empty victory would entail.

  “Okay, so it’s …” he turned his head, looking at the large clock on the far wall, the bright red numbers indicating the current time. “Two twenty-four. You’re pretty quick, so I’m guessing you have your queue time to less than an hour, which means someone sent a message between one and two o’clock PST. It’s Friday night—or Saturday morning—so the sender was either drunk, bored, or hopelessly hopeless, emailing his bank on a Friday night.”

  He cocked his head theatrically as Louis started typing. Behind him, Bridget snorted as she read the email over Louis’ shoulder. She tossed her bright blue hair and sat down heavily in her chair, blowing a small bubble and popping it as she sucked the candy into her mouth. Her small legs shot out from under the desk and she slammed her feet onto the desk top.

  “He doesn’t need your help Bridg, thanks,” said Louis, smiling despite himself as he hovered his mouse over the “Send” button.

  “Dude. Done. Drunk email, from a guy with no money in the account, who’s never had anyone listed as a co-owner. I’m guessing Alabama or Florida panhandle IP address?” Cam leaned forward, arms crossed on the cubicle wall, grin unbearable.

  Louis smiled slowly and shook his head as his finger tapped the left hand button on the mouse, sending the curt response back to the nether regions of online space.

  Behind him, Bridget laughed out loud and snapped a rubber band from the palm of her hand, sending it twirling past Louis and hitting Cam’s cubicle wall.

  “Yeah, okay. But that one was a gimme. Wait for …”

  Louis cut off as the entire building was suddenly plunged into complete darkness. The incessant and droning hum of hundreds of computers was silenced at once, shrouding the building in an instant cloak of inky black quiet.

  ***

  In Chicago, it was a man in a hotel, drinking a cup of coffee before his job interview. His gray suit, slightly tattered at the edges so that the cheap wool was fraying almost imperceptibly, soaked in the majority of the scalding liquid as he collapsed on the table.

  A waitress reached his side as he rolled on the ground in pain, voice hoarse and face constricted with pain. It was the reddened eyes and the hollowed cheeks, more than anything else, that made her call 911.

&nb
sp; In Miami, it was a valet at the airport, gasping for air on the asphalt in front of the Delta terminal.

  In Houston, a gardener collapsed on his pruning sheers; in Minneapolis, a teenage girl fell from her desk in homeroom; in Omaha, an elderly woman collapsed at her mailbox.

  In cities and states; in towns, cars and trucks, and hotels and airplanes across the nation, something was happening.

  ***

  Across the cavernous space, someone gasped loudly in the unexpected quiet. The sound of sudden movement echoed in the large, mostly-empty space as Bridget cursed behind him.

  The night shift only had ten workers. It was Louis’ team of three, another four phone representatives, two personal bankers that had to be available at all hours for the high value clients, and one manager, Rajesh, whose voice rose over the thin gray line of cubicle walls to Louis’ left.

  “Everyone stay calm, I’m sure it’s just a breaker.” His slightly lilting accent belied his upbringing in Seattle, and Louis blinked as the power flickered on once, then cut out again, replaced this time with bright red emergency lights. Flood lights near the exits suddenly glared in the red world, and across the large room someone fell against the ground hard, blinded by the sudden illumination. Despite himself, Louis guffawed loudly, drawing a smile from Cam as he glanced back over his shoulder.

  Behind Louis, Bridget was on her cell phone, trying to get a signal. She raised her hand above her head, squinting in the dark.

  “Not gonna happen, Bridg,” said Cam, walking into the aisle between the cubicles and patting his hip pocket suggestively, the bulge of his large geek-phone apparent in his corduroy cargo pants. “You know that reception is for shit in this crypt.”

  “Hey Voj,” said Louis, standing from his chair and looking in the direction of the night manager, who shot him a dirty look from his slightly larger cubicle. “Any info on this? Can we go home?”