Page 19 of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World

Twelve

After my date with Eric, I was on cloud nine.

Nothing—not even sinister promises from world-devouring monsters—could dent my mood.

I drifted through Sunday in a pleasant haze, smiling at the surly woman who lived across the hall and giving a rapturous play-by-play of our date to a pair of very nice Jehovah’s Witnesses who made the mistake of approaching me while I was running errands.

That same feeling persisted into Monday morning as I crossed the echoing lobby at Dark Enterprises, waving cheerfully at the receptionist while she ignored me.

Waiting at the elevators was Lydia, another executive assistant who worked for the fearsome head of Personnel, Ms. Yamada.

I’d first encountered Lydia while she was trying to blot blood out of her silk blouse, and after running into her several more times I’d realized that she always had blood somewhere on her person.

It was probably because of all the performance reviews she oversaw for Ms. Yamada, but she must have been really hands-on to be hit by so many arterial sprays.

Despite the perpetual blood spatter, though, Lydia was friendly and surprisingly noncreepy, which I appreciated.

“Good morning,” she murmured.

“Hi, Lydia. How are you?”

“Oh, you know. It’s going to be another busy day.” She made a face.

Nodding sympathetically as one of the elevators arrived, I waited for her to enter before following. “Ms. Crenshaw is showing me how to divine the future this morning,” I told her while she pressed the button for thirteen. “I’m looking forward to it.”

“How fun!” she said enthusiastically. Then her expression grew serious.

“Try not to peer too deeply, though. I once knew someone who caught a glimpse of his own death. He always said it didn’t bother him, but he developed an irrational fear of pocket change.

” Lydia shook her head sadly. “In the end, someone threw a penny off the top of the Chrysler Building.”

“And it went through his skull and killed him?” I guessed in a horrified whisper.

“Oh, no. It landed on the sidewalk. But it startled him so badly that he stepped out into the street and was decapitated by an antique mirror being carried by a bike courier.” She thought about it for a moment.

“It’s funny, isn’t it? You’d think he would have been more afraid of mirrors. Or bike couriers.”

I considered this in silence until we reached the thirteenth floor. As we both departed the elevator, Lydia said, “Why don’t you join me for lunch today? Noon, in the cafeteria.”

“Sure,” I said, still thinking about decapitations. “That sounds nice.”

Lydia headed off to get blood sprayed on her while I made my way to Ms. Crenshaw’s office, now decidedly less excited about looking into the future.

My steps slowed abruptly as another thought occurred to me.

What if there was no future? What if I peered through time and saw nothing but that faceless Thing devouring the last of our world?

Would my brain explode like the oracles down in Analysis and Logistics?

Quickly running through potential excuses I could use to get out of this lesson, I concluded that nothing short of a catastrophic and life-threatening accident would help.

Thus, it was with some misgivings that I soon found myself trying to divine the future with a set of human teeth while Ms. Crenshaw watched from the other side of her desk.

“What do you see?” she asked. Her phone dinged quietly, and she glanced at its screen.

Rattling the teeth between my hands, I let them spill across the glass surface with a sound like a macabre xylophone.

“Uh.” I squinted down at the teeth and tried to read something in their scattered arrangement.

Was that a body with four legs? “You’re going to adopt a puppy?

” I ventured, my voice rising uncertainly.

“I’m allergic.”

I tilted my head to one side, then the other. “The stock market is going to rise,” I guessed, trying to sound more definitive.

Ms. Crenshaw arched an eyebrow.

“It’s going to rain tomorrow,” I blurted, which was cheating because I’d checked the forecast on my way in to work.

Shaking her head in disappointment, she rose to her feet. “You need to open your consciousness and see. The answers are right in front of you.”

I stayed in my chair. “What do you see, then?”

She turned her head to peer down at the yellowed teeth strewn across her desk. “You have a very unpleasant surprise awaiting you,” she said after a moment, her dark eyes flicking back to me.

I swallowed uneasily. “Great. But…who am I talking to? I mean, who’s sending me these messages about the future?”

“No one. You are simply opening your mind to probabilities that already exist.” She crossed the room to take her bright blue suit jacket from where it hung next to the door. “There are forms of divination in which one asks questions of particular entities, but those are generally much riskier.”

“Entities like—?”

“Those that exist beyond the limits of conventional reality, usually. They have a perspective that we lack.” Shrugging on her jacket, she brushed a piece of lint from her lapel.

“The Eternal Ones, for example, dwell outside of time, though asking them for favors often comes at the price of one’s sanity.

The spirits of the damned are easier to manage, but reaching across the Veil can have unexpected and dangerous consequences.

And then there are the Prophets of the Black Sun, if you don’t mind people who wear socks with sandals and refuse to be vaccinated. ”

I shuddered.

“Now,” she went on briskly, “I have a meeting in Analysis and Logistics. Tidy up those teeth and then get in touch with R&D. Some of our investors are starting to grow impatient with our lack of progress in creating a more docile global population. Tell our people that I want actionable proposals on my desk by Friday, and if I’m not satisfied, they’ll spend the next two weeks suffering unimaginable agonies at a corporate retreat. ”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Once she was gone, I turned and stared fiercely at the scattered teeth, willing them to reveal their answers. No matter how hard I peered, though, they just looked like teeth to me. With a sigh, I swept them back into a small velvet bag and retreated to my desk.

What I needed, I thought, were answers. I needed someone to tell me what I’d freed in that elevator, and then how to stop it from killing everyone.

Beyond a few people like Amira and Eric, I wasn’t really invested in the survival of humanity.

What had they ever done for me? At the same time, there wasn’t any point in angling for a position in middle management if there was nothing outside this building but a postapocalyptic wasteland.

I wanted centuries to grind the jocks and beauty queens into the dirt, and I couldn’t do that if they were devoured by the Thing.

Stopping it was still my best chance to have everything I’d ever wanted.

I spent the rest of the morning tossing those teeth onto my desk, hoping for a hint as to what to do next. If it was there, though, I couldn’t see it.

At noon precisely, I made my way to the elevators for my lunch date with Lydia.

My heart sank a little, though, when I found Deborah waiting there instead.

She worked for Barney Samuels, and she’d only just returned from the Abyss after being translocated there last week by the Cursed Periapt of Anhk-Magon.

Deborah had been roughly my age when she disappeared, but time in the Abyss tended to be a little wonky and she now looked to be in her mid-forties, her face and hands both covered in a network of fine scars.

No one knew what she’d endured in her two subjective decades down there, but when she discovered that Mr. Samuels had replaced her, she’d challenged his new assistant to a duel and promptly hacked off poor Blaine’s arm with a sword of smoking ice.

After that, everyone tried to stay on her good side.

“Hi there,” I said, pausing a careful distance away.

Deborah’s head whipped around, teeth bared in a faint grimace, though she relaxed when she saw it was me. “Oh. Hi, Colin.”

“How’re you?”

“Alive. For now.”

An awkward silence descended.

“Going down to lunch?” I asked eventually.

“Yes.”

“It’s pierogies today, I think.”

She stared at me. “Unless they are filled with the congealed blood of my enemies, I do not want pierogies.”

“Okay. I think there are chicken sandwiches, too.”

Her expression brightened. “I love chicken sandwiches. They’re so crispy.”

The elevator arrived then, thankfully. As we got on, something occurred to me. “Do you know about the, uh, competition for the two spots in middle management?” I asked as I pressed the button for the tenth floor.

Deborah nodded. “Yes. Mr. Samuels asked me to recuse myself.”

“Why?”

“Because my slaughtering all of you is a foregone conclusion.”

I blinked at her.

“Mr. Samuels would like me to slaughter fewer people overall, and devote more time instead to improving my organizational skills.”

“Huh.”

“I have also forgotten how to use Microsoft Teams,” she confided. “We didn’t have Teams in the Abyss.”

“I guess the Abyss isn’t that bad after all,” I joked weakly.

Her gaze bored into me.

“Um. I mean—”

“I hope you survive,” she interrupted. “I enjoy your bow ties.”