by Brian Olsen
Contents
Title
About This Book
Dedication
Chapter One: Kiyomi running
Chapter Two: Alan temping
Chapter Three: Caitlin auditioning
Chapter Four: Mark training
Chapter Five: Dakota working
Chapter Six: Alan drinking
Chapter Seven: David resigning
Chapter Eight: Dakota recovering
Chapter Nine: Alan dating
Chapter Ten: Mark losing
Chapter Eleven: Caitlin partying
Chapter Twelve: Dakota strategizing
Chapter Thirteen: Alan, Caitlin and Mark investigating
Chapter Fourteen: Caitlin fighting
Chapter Fifteen: Pete flying
Chapter Sixteen: Dakota leading
Chapter Seventeen: Mark thinking
Chapter Eighteen: Alan choosing
Chapter Nineteen: Mark, Dakota, Caitlin and Alan progressing
Thanks from the Author
Caitlin Ross Chapter One: Deshawn changing
Caitlin Ross Chapter Two: Caitlin hurrying
Caitlin Ross Chapter Three: Alan volunteering
Also by Brian Olsen - The Future Next Door
Also by Brian Olsen - The Dystopia Spell
Also by Brian Olsen - This Is What He Should Have Said
Also by Brian Olsen - The Unnatural Haunting of Mrs. Beverly Snow
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
ALAN LENNOX
AND THE
TEMP JOB
OF
DOOM
Brian Olsen
About This Book
For more from Brian Olsen, including a free story and alerts to new releases, sign up for his monthly newsletter at www.brianolsenbooks.com.
Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom
Alan Lennox has been assigned yet another soul-crushing temp job, keeping him from his first loves – drinking, playing video games, and looking for a boyfriend. But Alan’s new job proves to be anything but boring when his co-workers start turning up dead. The mysterious megacorporation Amalgamated Synergy has taken a deadly interest in Alan and his three roommates, and the hapless quartet are woefully unequipped to deal with the psychotic secretaries, murderous middle managers, and villainous vice-presidents hunting them down. Their investigation leads them deep into Amalgamated Synergy’s headquarters, but can Alan and his friends stay alive long enough to discover who – or what – waits for them on the top floor?
Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom is the first book of The Future Next Door, a contemporary urban science fiction comedic thriller series in four parts.
Book One: Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom
Book Two: Caitlin Ross and the Commute from Hell
Book Three: Mark Park and the Flume of Destiny
Book Four: Dakota Bell and the Wastes of Time
For my parents, Buddy and Violet Olsen.
Chapter One
Kiyomi running
Kiyomi Ohori ran for her life down a hallway on the sixteenth floor of the Tokyo headquarters of the Kurihara Motors corporation. She leaped over a wastepaper basket and clipped the top with her heel. For one terrifying moment she thought she was going to fall, but she kept her balance as the small basket overturned. She ignored the blood dripping down her cheek and focused on the door to the lobby ahead of her.
She didn’t want to risk a look behind her, afraid it would slow her down. She didn’t need to look to know she was still being pursued. She could hear Mr. Sato huffing and puffing as he chased her. He was older and less fit than she was, but he wasn’t dizzy from taking a baseball bat to the head. The exit was close, but he might still catch up to her before she reached it. She put on another burst of speed.
She had no idea why her manager was trying to kill her. He was a nice man and they had gotten along well in the two months she had been working for Kurihara. Just last week she had thought of a new way to improve their vendor database. It was only a small change, but the other office ladies had told her that it was inappropriate for her to be suggesting improvements while she was still so new to the company. Despite their disapproval, she had gathered her courage and presented her modification to Mr. Sato. He had liked her idea, and had promised to pass it up to his supervisors for further discussion.
Kiyomi had been so proud when she had been hired by Kurihara. She was only twenty-two and this was her first job. She threw herself into it with great enthusiasm, working long hours and never leaving the office for the day before Mr. Sato. She even learned the old company anthem, even though nobody really sang it anymore.
Her father hadn’t approved. He didn’t like the idea of her working at all, especially not for a company owned by Americans. Kurihara Motors was a subsidiary of Amalgamated Synergy, a multinational corporation based in New York. An American-owned Japanese car company was extremely unusual, but until lately Kurihara’s management had at least had the common decency to downplay their foreign masters. In the last year, though, new marketing campaigns trumpeted the company as “part of the Amalgamated Synergy family.” Their share of the Western markets expanded, but domestic sales plummeted.
This was the only part of working for Kurihara that Kiyomi disliked. The Amalgamated Synergy name was everywhere. As much as it irked her to agree with her father, she resisted the omnipresent American corporate culture in her workplace, finding it embarrassing.
Mr. Sato felt quite differently. He would often extol at length on the pride he felt at devoting his life to such a grand company as Amalgamated Synergy. Kiyomi pitied her manager – he had given much to AmSyn, but it had not given much back in return. He had held the same low-status position without advancement for many years. Whenever he spoke to her about how lucky they were to be even a small cog in the vast machine of Amalgamated Synergy, she would smile and nod politely. In her heart, she preferred to pretend that Kurihara was wholly Japanese.
She didn’t have anything in particular against the United States – some of her best friends were Americans. She had spent a year studying abroad in Boston and had made many life-long friends. Although, she realized, it was indirectly the fault of one of those friends that she was currently running for her life.
Since returning to Tokyo, Kiyomi had kept in close touch with her American ex-roommate Louise. A few weeks ago, Louise had emailed her an invitation to play an online game called Work It. It was only a silly little workplace simulator but Kiyomi enjoyed it. When she wasn’t at work or out with friends, Kiyomi was on her computer at home, playing.
Or she had been, until yesterday. Her father, looking for something new to get angry about, had decided video games were a waste of time and were henceforth banned from his household. Kiyomi had reluctantly logged off, and assumed that was the end of Work It until she had saved enough money to move out.
But that evening, at her desk, temptation struck. She had worked late, as usual, and her floor was deserted. She hadn’t noticed Mr. Sato leave, but his office was dark and she guessed he had slipped out while she was enthralled in her database.
She knew she shouldn’t do it, that work was for work, not for play. But everyone was gone, the work day was done, she was getting ready to leave – and, she rationalized, it’s not as if the game would be taking her away from her tasks. She was supposed to go dancing that night, and she didn’t relish the idea of going home first to face her father’s disapproval. What harm would it do, she thought, to spend an hour or two at her desk, playing a game, just until it was time to meet her friends?
So she had turned her monitor back on, ty
ped in the address for the game’s site and logged in. She eagerly lost herself in the pointless activities of her avatar. She had checked to see if Louise was playing, but there was no sign of her friend. Instead Kiyomi had found a message from an anonymous player inviting her to join his virtual company. She ignored it.
Two and a half hours later, she noticed the time and realized she would be late to meet her friends if she didn’t hurry. She logged out of the site, erased her browser history and shut down her computer. The screen went black, and she gave a short scream of surprise.
Mr. Sato was reflected in the darkness of her monitor. He didn’t look happy, she thought. Although he didn’t look angry, either. He didn’t look anything. His pudgy face, usually so expressive, was completely blank.
She spun around in her chair to beg his forgiveness and to assure him that it would never happen again. It was only because she had moved so quickly that she survived when he swung the baseball bat at her head.
Mr. Sato was a baseball fanatic. He was on the company team, and the bat he kept in his office was emblazoned with the logos for both Kurihara and Amalgamated Synergy. He had swung the bat down at her with all his might, but instead of cracking her skull open, the bat scraped against her right ear and cheek.
The force of the bat hitting the back of the chair knocked Kiyomi to the ground. She looked up at her mentor in pain and disbelief.
“Kiyomi Ohori,” he said slowly. “You are a tangible asset.” His face betrayed no emotion as he lifted the bat again. “You are no longer required.”
Kiyomi screamed. She reared back and kicked hard at her chair. It rolled into Mr. Sato, knocking him off-balance. She grabbed at the edge of her desk, pulled herself to her feet, and ran.
She bolted past her co-workers’ desks, down the corridor and towards the lobby. Her manager kept pace behind her. If she could reach the door first she could get to the exit stairs, and then to the street and safety. She ignored her fear and told herself she could do it – he was out of shape, and she wasn’t.
She heard him trip over the wastepaper basket she had knocked over, buying her a few seconds. She reached the glass door to the lobby and threw herself into it. It didn’t budge.
She pounded on it frantically. The door was never locked. She slammed the large button on the wall which was supposed to open it automatically, but nothing happened.
She spun around, hoping she could push past Mr. Sato and get to the emergency exit on the other end of the floor, but she was too late. He was there.
The baseball bat connected with the side of Kiyomi’s head. There was a thud and a crack and she slammed into the wall. She slid to the ground, moaning.
The pain was worse than any she had ever felt, but she remained conscious. She clung to the hope that she could still survive this, that her manager would come to his senses or that somebody would arrive to save her. Instead, Mr. Sato raised the bat again and hit her a second time.
The second blow brought her a measure of peace. The damage to her head was too severe for her to feel pain anymore. Blood and darkness filled her vision, but she could dimly make out Mr. Sato’s face. It was still blank, but his eyes were filled with tears. He opened his hand and the bat fell to the ground.
She watched calmly, distantly, as Mr. Sato hit the button for the lobby door, which opened easily. He crossed to the elevator bank. One of the elevator doors was wide open, but Kiyomi couldn’t see the elevator. Mr. Sato stepped into the open shaft without hesitating and disappeared from her view. She didn’t hear a sound from him as he fell sixteen stories to the basement below.
Kiyomi didn’t have time to wonder about why Mr. Sato had killed her and then himself. She coughed, and the pain returned. Blood poured from her mouth. She died wishing her father was there.
Chapter Two
Alan temping
Alan Lennox stared at the spreadsheet filling the screen before him. His eyes lost focus and the numbers doubled over on themselves, half the display dancing across the other half. He tried to remember what exactly he was supposed to be doing – adding, cross-checking, maybe numerology? His supervisor, Elsa, had emailed him the spreadsheet with the simple message, “Here u go! ;)” It had been cheery, but not particularly helpful.
Making matters more complicated, the spreadsheet program he was using was a cheap Excel knock-off called “Spread ’Em for Windows” and none of the controls were what he was used to. That morning, after spending an hour on a completely different but similarly confusing spreadsheet, he had learned to his dismay that Control-Z did not mean “undo” but rather “delete-all-then-save-and-close.”
He let his eyes come back into focus and rested them on the various personal items dotted about his cubicle. They weren’t his personal items, and it wasn’t really his cubical – he was temping, filling in for a woman named Latrice while she was on vacation somewhere tropical. Latrice was an administrative assistant at a mid-sized accounting firm, Dutton Foster, which was located in the Financial District in lower Manhattan. Her duties included answering phones, scheduling meetings, light filing, and occasionally doing mysterious things with spreadsheets. For the last two and a half days these had been Alan’s duties, and he had thrown himself into them with an amount of effort that could safely be described as “bare minimum.”
Whenever he tried to rally himself to perform with even a modicum of enthusiasm, his eye would catch one of the photos tacked to the corkboard next to his computer and his spirits would sag. Latrice didn’t look unhappy in the pictures – she was positively beaming in each and every one – but she was always alone. If Latrice had friends, family, even casual acquaintances, there was no sign of them in any of her photos. One showed Latrice smiling in front of the Universal Studios theme park in Los Angeles. In another she was radiant and wet while petting dolphins at an aquarium. In yet another she grinned from under a giant sombrero while drinking a margarita in a tacky Mexican theme restaurant. Alan wanted to believe that whoever was taking the photographs was Latrice’s constant companion, devoted and camera-shy, but he suspected that it was a different person each time, a waiter or a fellow tourist, happy to take a picture for the nice smiling woman traveling alone.
Alan shook his head. If Latrice’s solitude didn’t bother her, he wondered, why should it bother him? Their lives were nothing alike. She was an older, apparently single woman working as an assistant at an insignificant little accounting office. He was a younger, definitely single man working as an assistant at an insignificant little accounting office. Shit, he thought. At least Latrice can afford a vacation.
He stood up from his desk and walked briskly to the men’s room. He didn’t have to go, but he needed a break and he didn’t smoke, so his options were limited. The restroom was unoccupied, to his great relief. He didn’t feel like sitting in a stall playing with his phone for ten minutes. He walked to the counter and rested his hands on either side of the sink. He gazed at his reflection in the mirror, lit by the harsh fluorescent lighting. Nothing really wrong there, he thought, on the surface. Reasonably handsome – well, cute, maybe. The blue eyes get a lot of compliments. No facial blemishes or scars to speak of. The hair’s sort of an uninteresting shade of black, but at least it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Average height and weight. Not ripped, but passable enough if the shirt stays on. He wasn’t fighting the boys off with a stick, but he wasn’t begging for scraps either.
No, nothing really wrong, he thought, but nothing really right either. And he wasn’t just thinking about his looks anymore. Not for the first time, he wondered why he was working at a job he hated so much that he was standing in a smelly men’s room just to delay working at it for a few more minutes. Alan didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, beyond not answer phones for Dutton Foster. But that was what he would do, he told himself, for two and a half more days at least. He didn’t have any better options. He tried and failed to imitate Latrice’s smile, then washed his hands and slowly returned to his desk.
He looked at his computer again and tried to concentrate on the thousands of seemingly unrelated numbers Elsa had sent him, but all he could hear was the slowing beep-beep-beep-beeeeeeeeeep of the imaginary cardiac monitor hooked up to his soul. He glanced furtively around the cubicle farm. All of the managers’ doors were closed, and his fellow corporate cattle were either at lunch or lost in spreadsheets of their own. He minimized Spread ’Em and brought up Facebook. The six new notifications, three new messages and four new event invitations didn’t help him with the spreadsheet, but they banished the dismal feeling that this job might curse him with a life of solitude as it had Latrice.
His roommate Caitlin, an actor, had tagged him in a post asking for advice on choosing her new headshot. He looked through the various options she presented, which were, as far as he could tell, identical. In each of the six, she had her chin resting on her hand and her elbow resting on something just out of the bottom of the frame. She had an enormous smile, and her left eye was in a sort of semi-squint, like she had started to wink but changed her mind halfway through. She said the look she was going for was “sexy-wacky,” but all he could see was “pleading desperation.” He picked the one everybody else was picking.
His other roommate, Mark, had tagged him in a picture of one of his clients. Mark was a personal trainer and straight as a line, but was constantly sending Alan surreptitiously taken photos of his male clients in inadvertently suggestive poses. This one was of a muscular Caucasian fellow, lying on a bench lifting free weights. Mark must have been crouching on the floor at the end of the bench to capture this particular angle – straight on from the guy’s bent knees, looking up his shorts, catching a glimpse of his right testicle. Mark had added the caption, “Have a ball!” Alan replied, “Shouldn’t you be spotting him?!?” He noticed the photo was public – Mark didn’t have the greatest handle on privacy settings.
Alan was about to read a message from his sister when he got a text. It was from his other other roommate, Dakota.
