Authors: Little,Bentley
The Consultant (50 page)
Ahead, the labyrinth of cubicles ended, and the office beyond was an oversized version of a
Mad Men
-era executive suite, with low Danish modern tables, blocky chairs and sofas, and bland hotel art framed on walls that were spaced so far apart a four-lane highway could fit between them. At the far end, barely visible, was a gigantic wooden desk.
Craig could see in the structure of this office the bones of that terrible bloody room where he had faced the consultant before. Its size and the placement of the desk were roughly the same, as though one room had been superimposed over the other, and Craig wondered if what they were seeing was real or if their minds had been clouded to
think
this is what they were seeing.
Or had he been misled last time?
Maybe the office and the abattoir were both real.
“What do we do?” Lorene asked, but Craig didn’t answer, just kept walking forward.
Behind him, those employees who had come up from the first floor followed in single file, like children on a field trip. Their presence gave him courage, and his gait grew quicker and more assured as he proceeded across the massive office. In front of him, the desk was no longer a desk but a strange creature of approximately the same color and size. It was as though the tableaux at the far end of the room had become less hazy and was growing sharper the closer they came to it, only the desk had been well-defined to begin with. The object had not grown clearer with their approach, it had
changed
, and it was changing still, moving from all fours to two legs, standing, and though it was not in any way, manner or form human, Craig knew that it was the consultant.
Craig stopped. He was still several yards away but was afraid to get any closer. In his hand, he clutched the hammer tightly. The others who had been walking behind, spread out next to him, holding tightly to their own weapons.
The consultant stood before them, naked, his body a grotesque grayish brown, leathery skin covering a skeletal structure more raptor than man. His face was horrible: cold lizard eyes above a beaklike nose and hard lipless mouth. The age Craig had briefly sensed in him before was now evident to anyone who looked at him.
Craig took the offensive. “What are you?”
“I’ve had many names.”
“Oh, this is going to be one of those conversations?”
The consultant smiled in a manner that was far too wide and revealed teeth he should not have had.
“You destroyed our company.”
There was a chorus of assent.
“
BFG
didn’t destroy your company,” he said. “
You
did that.”
“You got rid of half our workforce,” Craig countered. “Whoever you didn’t lay off, you
killed
.”
“When you arrived to work tonight, this was CompWare. If you had gone to your offices and workstations, if you had done your
jobs
, it would still be CompWare. But you threw a tantrum, like spoiled children, and you fouled your own workplace.”
There was a truth to that, Craig knew, but it was a partial truth. The riot downstairs had only hastened what was going to happen anyway. The consultant had put them on this path. He had not been able to turn CompWare into the perfect company he wanted, so its fate held no interest for him. He didn’t care what happened to it, and it seemed to amuse him to watch it devolve.
“You’re a failure,” Craig said.
The consultant nodded in agreement. “I am.”
Someone off to the right—Benjy?—threw a stapler at the monster. It stopped in midair, hanging suspended in space for several seconds. Without taking his eyes off Craig, the consultant caused the stapler to whip back twice as hard and twice as fast as it had been thrown originally, hitting Benjy in the side of the head, then Cuong, both of them going down, screaming. Beneath, the floor trembled as though they were experiencing an earthquake.
The smile came again, and Craig glanced briefly away, unable to face all those teeth.
“You are a worthy adversary,” the consultant said. “I’ve had my eye on you from the beginning. I even admire the way you’ve handled your buddy’s completely unwarranted ascension to the head of this dying firm. It’s why I called this meeting today. I thought the two of us should have a discussion.”
Craig met those cold reptilian eyes. “We have nothing to discuss. And you didn’t
call
me here.”
But he had, hadn’t he?
That was why Craig had come upstairs instead of going out to join his family. He felt disoriented, as though he were not in charge of his own thoughts. He was aware that Lorene and several other people had coalesced around Benjy and Cuong to make sure they were okay, and he felt guilty that he’d made no effort to check on their injuries himself. They were only up here because of him.
He shook it off. “I assume you’re done here? You’re leaving?”
“Almost time,” the consultant conceded. “A few more loose ends to tie up…”
“Like what?”
“Like you.” The consultant was changing. Although he had not put on clothes, he was now wearing a business suit: gray pants, white shirt, red tie and gray jacket. He was faceless. Smooth skin covered the flat area where his features should have been. This, Craig suspected, was his true appearance, his real self. The monster from moments before had been their projection of him made flesh, but the consultant was not that sort of cartoon evil. His malevolence was more subtle, more insidious. He corrupted from within rather than from without, and the faceless businessman in front of them was the perfect embodiment of what he really was.
“I’m inviting you to join the team, to become a part of BFG.”
The consultant had no mouth and so could not speak, but his voice sounded clearly in Craig’s head, and it was obvious from the expressions on their faces that the others could hear him, too.
“Never,” Craig vowed.
“There are benefits—”
“Never.”
The faceless man shrugged. “It is your choice.”
Benjy and Cuong were jerked into the air and slammed into the ceiling, their feet kicking the faces of those administering to their wounds as they rocketed upward. The air suddenly felt thick, heavy, and a swirling wind caused everyone’s hair to stick up straight.
Without thinking, acting purely on instinct, Craig rushed forward. They all must have had the same impulse because everyone was rushing the consultant simultaneously, and before the wind could grow, before others could be hurled into the ceiling or thrown against a wall, they were upon him, makeshift weapons pounding, hacking, slashing. Craig raised his hammer and brought it down, claw-end first, on the consultant’s right arm, feeling a satisfying crunch as metal sank through flesh and hit bone. Then he was jostled aside as other employees pushed their way in, eager to administer their own personal justice.
Falling onto his stomach, Craig crawled out of the dogpile. The consultant’s voice in his head was silent, the wind was gone and the thickness of the air had dissipated. The only noises in the office were the grunts and cries of attacking employees.
He looked up at the ceiling, saw nothing, then looked down and saw Cuong’s and Benjy’s lifeless bodies lying in a contorted heap on the floor.
The sounds of violence were becoming more disturbing—
wetter
—and Craig stood. “Stop!” he ordered. He wasn’t anyone’s boss other than the programmers, but the mob listened to him, the fray petering out as employees backed off and separated. The consultant’s body lay there, bloody and unmoving.
But it wasn’t the consultant’s body.
It was Phil’s.
That was impossible. Craig had been staring into that blank face as he’d pounded the arm with his hammer. It had been the consultant’s. And Phil was downstairs somewhere or on another floor. There was no way the two could have been switched.
But the proof lay before him.
The consultant was gone.
And Phil’s dead body, cut and beaten by his fellow workers, was on its back, eyes in the battered face staring upward into nothingness. Craig was reminded of a figure on the cover of some album, but, try as he might, he could come up with neither the name of the band nor the title of the record.
Phil would know
, he thought, and a profound sadness settled over him. He realized at that precise moment just how much he would miss his friend.
Legs giving way beneath him, Craig sat down hard on the floor, grateful for some reason for the pain that shot through his body as his butt landed on the ground.
Huell tried to lift him up by his arm. “Are you okay?”
And Craig started to cry.
FORTY TWO
Holding tightly on to Dylan’s hand, with his other arm around Angie’s waist, Craig stood in the parking lot with several of the programmers and others who had accompanied him to the seventh floor. He watched the police round up dazed rioters while firemen attempted to put out myriad blazes on the CompWare property and in the building. He felt drained and empty, sad and shell-shocked, but underneath all that was a deep abiding sense of relief. It was over. It may have ended badly, may have ended
horribly
, but it had ended, and that brought him a surprising measure of peace.
He looked up at the building, counting up to the seventh floor, and was gratified to see flames shooting out from shattered windows. He wished the consultant was up there, but he knew that wasn’t the case. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did, and his hope was that the firemen would put out the blaze quickly enough to preserve whatever the hell that floor had become. The second floor, too.
There might be enough evidence left for the authorities to go after the consultant or at least destroy the reputation of BFG.
Who was he kidding? The consultant would just change his name and the name of his firm.
He never had found out what the acronym BFG stood for, he realized.
If you don’t know that, you don’t know anything
, the consultant had said.
What did that mean?
Craig didn’t know. He looked at the burning ruins of the CompWare campus, wondering if this could have been avoided, if there were something he could have done to prevent all of this death and destruction. A brown paper bag skittered along the ground, propelled by the breeze, two eyeholes cut in its face.
What had happened to the guards with the automatic weapons?
There were so many questions to which he didn’t know the answer, to which he might
never
know the answer.
He squeezed Dylan’s hand, held Angie tighter.
This was what was important. This was what mattered.
He saw Rusty being wheeled into the back of an ambulance. Phil was dead, Matthews was dead, Benjy and Cuong were dead, and so were God knew how many others. Those remaining were now jobless, every last one of them unemployed, though he couldn’t help thinking that they were better off unemployed than working for what CompWare had become.
He stared up at the night sky, the stars made invisible by the lights of the city and the illumination of the fires.
And the consultant? Craig wondered. Where was the consultant?
But he knew the answer to that one, didn’t he?
His eyes focused again on the burning seventh floor.
In a meeting.
The consultant was in a meeting.
He was always in a meeting.
Praise Ralph.
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