Defekt

by Nino Cipri

  Derek desperately wanted to be somewhere else. The sales floor. The receiving and assembly area. His shipping container. Home, he thought, and realized that he had no idea where or what that was.

  “Of course—” not, he’d meant to say, but Derek choked on the last word, and had to hunch over against his coughing fit.

  Reagan watched him with that same bright, impersonal smile. It was like watching winter sunlight reflect off a frozen lake. “Tricia mentioned that you were out sick yesterday,” she said.

  Once Derek’s throat stopped spasming, he took a shaky breath. “No, it was just a, a personal day.” He could barely choke the words out: “For personal improvement.”

  Reagan snorted. “That’s not what you told the LitenVärld health line.”

  Derek flushed. He wasn’t sure why he’d assumed that the information he’d said there wouldn’t be shared with his managers.

  Reagan was still giving him that cold, sharp smile. Don’t lie to me, that smile said. But don’t tell me anything I don’t want to hear.

  Derek swallowed past the ache in his throat. “I’m feeling much better. Very . . . improved.”

  “That’s good,” Reagan said soothingly. She flipped the folder on the desk closed. “That’s good. I’m glad.”

  “Is that everything?” Derek tried not to sound too hopeful. “Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

  “I can see how you made sales associate of the month twice,” Reagan said. Her smile had shifted back to what he’d seen first, a pastel quirk of her lips, no sign of the sharpness behind her face. “There’s one other thing, since you mentioned it.”

  Derek had risen halfway out of his seat. He sank back down into it, biting back a frustrated sigh. “Yes?” he asked.

  “Your appearance today is a little off,” Reagan said. “Not up to your usual standards.”

  Derek looked down at himself. “I double-checked, everything I’m wearing is acceptable to—”

  “Yes, but you’re not an acceptable employee, are you, Derek? You’re an exceptional one.”

  Derek, for the first time he could remember, did not feel a warm pulse of pleasure at being complimented on his performance. He felt scared—that’s what that feeling was, that trembling pit opening up in his chest. Something had gone wrong. He had made a mistake somewhere along the line, and now he was being punished for it. He didn’t know what the punishment would be, and he wouldn’t know until it was being enacted.

  He couldn’t remember being afraid before. Not like this. He didn’t like it.

  “I thought this would be better than—”

  “Than what?”

  Reagan was looking at him very seriously. She didn’t seem to blink. “I cut myself shaving this morning. It looked . . . unpleasant.”

  Reagan kept looking at him, and Derek hoped she couldn’t somehow see through him; he thought of the razor clanking into the steel basin of the bathroom sink, and then the blood falling on top of it. The razor hadn’t cut him, but he’d still bled.

  “You know, I think taking a day off did you some good,” Reagan said crisply. “How would you feel about taking another one?”

  “I . . . what?”

  “After the maskhål incident yesterday, corporate has decided to do an overnight special inventory at this store. We’ll need a point person for the inventory team we’re bringing in,” Reagan said. “I think you’re the best person for the job.”

  “I am?” Derek said. The change in her tone was jarring. “I mean, I’m always happy to take on an extra shift.”

  Reagan’s smile tightened around the corners. “I’ll go ahead and put you on for the overnight inventory shift. You can go ahead and collect your things and head back to your containment unit, take the day off.”

  “Should I tell Tricia?” he asked. He desperately wanted to get out of there, but he couldn’t leave without at least offering.

  “No need,” Reagan said. “I’m sure she’s lurking out in the hallway eavesdropping on us.”

  Derek stumbled up out of his chair. “Well, it was nice talking with you, Reagan. Please let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

  Reagan watched him unwaveringly as he backed out of the office. He waved nervously to her before slipping out the door, closing it behind him. He took a second to sigh heavily in relief—cut short when someone cleared their throat behind him.

  He flinched away, hands coming up to . . . what? Fight? Protect himself?

  “Calm down, Derek,” Tricia said, rolling her eyes. She was leaning against the wall a few feet away.

  He thought Reagan had been joking about the eavesdropping.

  “You’re going home?” she asked.

  Derek nodded, wiping his sweaty palms on his khakis, leaving dark, damp streaks on the fabric.

  “Coming back for inventory tonight?”

  Another nod. “What time should I be here?”

  “Anytime after closing.” Tricia sounded tired.

  She edged past him into her office, kicking the door shut behind her with one heel. Derek considered lingering a moment longer, eavesdropping the same way she apparently had, then frowned at himself. Had one tense conversation with HR really made him into the kind of employee who would try to catch some gossip between upper and middle management? It had been a rough couple of days, but that wasn’t any kind of excuse. Derek gathered his things from his locker and left.

  Changes to normal operations: special inventories

  It will occasionally be necessary to conduct a special inventory on your store’s goods. These are not the same as the biannual inventory, which is an overtime shift undertaken by non-exempt hourly employees.

  Your manager will be responsible for calling in the Special Inventory to corporate, but if you observe any of the following in your store, you should immediately communicate them to your supervisor. (For further definitions of these phenomena, consult the appendix.)

  Missing items that cannot be explained by theft or inventory mismanagement

  Unexplained blood, bile, or other bodily effluvia

  The sound of breathing

  The feeling of a persistent presence when you know you are alone

  Unidentifiable molds, fungi, or pests

  If nothing is done and the problems persist, please use the special hotline listed at the end of this page, and your report will be heard. False reports will be investigated and may be punished by verbal warnings, written warnings, loss or reduction of seniority and other benefits, unpaid leave, suspension, or termination.

  WE ASSERT ORDER IN A CHAOTIC UNIVERSE.

  WE TAKE YOUR SAFETY SERIOUSLY.

  From The LitenVärld Special Employees Handbook

  Chapter 3: Known and Unknown Risks

  Derek made his way across the parking lot, his toes aching with cold in his work boots. He’d never worked an inventory shift before, but his dread over the strange meetings with Tricia and Reagan had faded in the intervening hours. He was looking forward to being in the store after hours; he’d always liked being alone with the furniture, the rooms, the housewares. In the blue-black night, broken only by harsh yellow sodium lamps, the stalwart walls of LitenVärld looked like a fortress, all-powerful and endless.

  Tricia was waiting for him outside the big sliding doors, silhouetted against the bright light that spilled out of the front entrance twenty-four hours a day.

  “Good evening, Tricia, I hope your day was—”

  “It was fine, Derek,” she said. She handed him a cardboard box with the word INVENTERA printed on the side in LitenVärld’s trademarked font, along with a handwritten note in permanent marker: RETURN TO HQ AT END OF INVENTORY SHIFT.

  Derek peeked inside while Tricia fumbled through her ring of keys. The objects in the box looked like barcode scanners, though they weren’t the cute, boxy gray ones they used at the registers. They were a dark, iridescent black with bright red accents. They were shaped almost like guns, and they gave off a dangerous air. Derek
touched one gingerly; the material felt . . . almost organic? The color of the items shifted as he hefted the box, and Derek thought of oil slicks and beetle shells.

  “So, I’ve never worked one of these shifts before, and I was just wondering—”

  “The inventory team will explain it to you,” Tricia said curtly. She yanked open the door and looked at him expectantly.

  He hesitated, sensing that he’d done something wrong and wanting to fix it.

  “Derek,” Tricia said. “It’s been a long couple of days, and all I want to do is go home, drink an entire bottle of pinot grigio, and fall asleep in the bathtub.”

  Derek felt compelled to point out, “That poses a danger of drowning.”

  Tricia’s shoulders stiffened. “Get in the goddamn store, Derek.”

  Derek shuffled past her. Tricia tried to slam the door behind him, but the pneumatic hinge fought her the entire way, and it was an agonizing six seconds before she managed to lock the door. Derek, still confused and upset, gingerly waved at her through the glass. Tricia sneered, then turned away and stalked off to her car. A moment later, she peeled out of the parking lot, apparently quite intent on her date with a bottle of pinot grigio. Derek turned back to the darkened store.

  “Hello?” he called out. Tricia had made it sound like the inventory team would already be here, but the store seemed very empty, Derek’s voice echoing back to him.

  Derek took a few steps into the store and called out again. “Hello? I was told that the inventory team would meet me? Is anyone here?”

  The front entrance opened up into a wide foyer, with registers to the left, obscured by shelves of clearance and sales items for impulse buys. To the right was the food court and Scandinavian market, a smattering of tables and chairs looking out onto the flat, ice-covered fields beyond the parking lot.

  The main path through the store split into three a few dozen feet past the foyer; two made circuitous, overlapping routes through the showrooms, while the one on the right, which Derek took now, led more or less directly to the customer service desk. His coworkers had found his intuitive ability to orient himself in the store to be one more unbearable thing about him; most new employees needed a map and at least a month to make their way through the store.

  The emergency lights in the store—because LitenVärld never went truly dark, a fact that filled Derek with an inchoate sense of pride and safety—limned the walls, with reddish blobs affixed at intervals and puddling on the floor. Glowing crimson strips lined the walkways that wound through the store, with arrows directing customers toward the exits.

  Derek made his way to the customer service desk, thinking he’d be able to find the inventory team on the CCTV monitors. He dropped the box on the counter, but then stopped at an odd sound coming from some of the showrooms. The sound didn’t make sense at first, an odd rustling like someone dragging a bundle of sticks along the floor. Derek stopped walking, trying to triangulate the sound’s location. Had raccoons somehow gotten into the store?

  Raccoons would be annoying, but he was on the clock, which made it his problem. He set the box of scanners on the customer service desk and listened again, ear cocked. The scraping came again, though with the layout of the store, it was hard to pinpoint exactly where it was coming from. One of the children’s bedrooms, he thought. He ducked into a kitchen that dwarfed the one in Derek’s container, then slid through a shortcut behind a set of wall-mounted shelving.

  Few of the other employees knew as many shortcuts through the store as Derek did. It was all about efficiency; sometimes, to help a customer or a teammate, he needed to be able to traverse from Bathrooms to the Clearance section without having to detour through the Food Court.

  Derek pulled the movable shelves back until he heard them click into place. The scraping came again, definitely closer now. Derek wished he’d brought a flashlight with him as he followed the sound. He paused outside a children’s playroom. The scraping sound was coming from inside, so he peered gently around the corner.

  Derek liked this playroom more than the others; it had a farmyard theme that was much more restrained than the princess- or superhero-themed rooms, and not quite as hectic as the jungle. The bed was shaped like a tractor, the walls were painted a calming sky blue, with wall decals of rolling hills, fluffy clouds, and tall sunflowers. There was a scattering of stuffed animals, including a life-sized plush of a donkey wearing a sunhat, and beanbag chairs that looked like hay bales. It was also the least popular kids’ room; only farmers wanted their kids to grow up and run a farm, and farmer parents were kind of thin on the ground in the Chicago suburbs.

  The scraping sound came again, and Derek’s eyes caught movement behind one of the hay bales. Derek stepped into the room and the movement ceased, but he made his way cautiously over to the bean bags. Behind them was a big wicker basket, one of their larger models, about two feet in diameter. It stood upside down on the floor.

  It didn’t belong in this playroom, but a customer or another associate might have left it here by mistake. Derek wasn’t sure how it could have made the scraping noise he’d heard, but he didn’t want to worry about things he could only speculate on.

  Derek bent down to pick it up, but something seemed to be holding it down.

  He stared at the basket, annoyed that it had thwarted his innate compulsion to tidy, and that he could not think of any reason why it was stuck that made more sense than that: something was holding it tight and had no intention of letting go. Derek huffed angrily, got a good grip on the basket, and yanked it. A SVINLÅDA, which must have been stuck beneath the basket, teetered, nearly toppled over, then managed to stay standing.

  This one must have been a different model than the one Jules had been assembling before; the ears on that SVINLÅDA had been small, neat flaps of faux leather that fell to each side of its vague face. This model’s ears were nearly as large as a real pig’s, made of a thin, leathery fabric, pointing intently forward as if listening for something.

  “Huh,” said Derek.

  One of the ears flicked toward him.

  Derek stumbled back, the sole of his shoe squeaking on the floor, and the SVINLÅDA’s other ear twisted around to follow the noise.

  “Okay,” he said. “That’s . . . No.”

  The last word slipped out when the SVINLÅDA gave an all-over twitch.

  “No,” Derek said again, like he was yelling at a customer’s dog that had decided to relieve itself on the Astroturf in Backyard and Recreation. “No, don’t—”

  The SVINLÅDA took a step toward him, its stubby wooden trotter clicking on the floor. Derek backed up, trying to maintain space between him and the thing, but tripped over one of the beanbags. He hit his head against the fake tractor wheel attached to the bed, fell into the life-size donkey, and rolled onto the cold cement floor, clutching his head. When he blinked open his eyes, the SVINLÅDA seemed to be staring at him with its eyeless face, both ears upright in his direction. It took a couple steps forward, and Derek scooted backward, colliding with the smooth plastic side of the tractor bed.

  “Don’t come any closer,” he barked at it.

  The head tilted.

  “Just stay where you are,” he said.

  The SVINLÅDA seemed to be listening to him. It gave an odd, snorting sigh and sat back on its haunches. The lid on its back creaked open and two long, thin stalks poked out, a darker pink than the rest of the upholstery. After a moment, Derek realized that there was an eye on the end of each wobbly stalk. One stared directly at him, while the other looked around nervously.

  “Okay,” Derek said. “That’s . . . I’m just gonna—”

  He started inching away from the creature, not taking his eyes off it. He scooted himself along the bed until he reached the wall, then groped along it until he could pull himself up onto unsteady legs. One of the eye stalks tracked his progress, the other still looking around nervously.

  “You . . .” he started. “You’re not going to hurt me, are you?”<
br />
  The creature gazed at him expectantly, and something about its posture made him unclench a little bit.

  “You’re almost cute,” he said. “And definitely nicer than a raccoon.”

  The two tiny drawers on each side of the SVINLÅDA pushed open, and long, spindly, segmented arms poked out, with blunt, curving pincers on each end. It made the SVINLÅDA look a little like a crab. The two arms reached out toward Derek, and he twitched away from them, ready to flee. But they didn’t seem to be threatening. The SVINLÅDA had turned its porcine not-quite-face up toward him, and the way the two arms stretched seemed . . . supplicating? Like it wanted something from him.

  The eye stalks both zeroed in on his face. Then they drifted down, toward—

  Derek held up the basket. “This? This is what you want.”

  The pincers clacked excitedly, reaching toward the basket.

  As Derek hesitantly leaned forward to put the basket back in the SVINLÅDA’s reach, a resounding crash from behind nearly made him trip. As Derek turned to look, he felt something snag on the basket; the SVINLÅDA had grabbed hold of one of the handles. It tugged again, not like it was trying to pull it from him, but like it was trying to pull Derek away from the doorway.

  “What?” he asked. One of the SVINLÅDA’s eye stalks and both of its ears were now trained on a point behind Derek and to his left, where the crash had come from. The other eye stalk’s gaze bored into Derek, as it tried again to pull him away from the door. It was trying to communicate something to him, Derek thought, despite its obvious nervousness.

  It wasn’t afraid of him; it had been calm a second ago, even when he had been freaking out. Whatever had made that sound, though—that had scared it.