Murder! That was it. The stiff got himself shanked.
It was kind of cool when he thought about it. But that just made him resent his exile even more.
I could be downstairs with a real live dead Egyptian gangbanger, but instead I’m in the goddamn finger-painting room.
Gilbert angrily paced the floor, stopping short in front of a painting on the wall.
Huh. So, that’s a Kandinsky.
It wasn’t anything dirty at all. He thought that it looked like a drop cloth. Gilbert turned his head to different angles, but no matter how he squinted, the Kandinsky refused to not look like a drop cloth.
His interest in the painting lasted exactly fifty-seven more seconds. Then he was desperately bored again and it made him sleepy.
Wait. Froehlich said there’s no surveillance up here. So, who’s to know?
Gilbert looked around and found an alcove at the far end of the gallery where no one could see him from the stairs or the elevator. Stepping inside, he slid down into a sitting position and closed his eyes. In his dreams, he and Harkhuf rode the log flume together at Disneyland, giving the world the finger. Shooting the bird to the Mouse with a mummy. That was a one hundred percent way to get on the news.
The next thing Gilbert became aware of was his walkie-talkie crackling. He fumbled getting it off his belt and nearly dropped it.
“Ferris here,” he said.
“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you,” barked Froehlich.
“Sorry. I’ve been having some trouble with the walkie, but it’s working okay now.”
“Whatever. Get back to the mummy exhibit. The crew is taking their lunch break. You need to watch the exhibit.”
Gilbert checked his watch. “But it’s almost my lunch, too.”
“Newman called in sick. We’re shorthanded, so you’ll have to eat later.”
Gilbert gritted his teeth. “I’ll be right down,” he said as his admiration for Harkhuf’s Tupac-like death instantly evaporated.
When he got downstairs, Froehlich was waiting for him. The sarcophagus was open and Harkhuf lay on his back, staring with his empty mummy eye sockets at the overhead lights. Gilbert peered into the case. There was only one thing he knew about Harkhuf that was supposed to make him special. Both his arms and his legs were secured to the inner case with a wax seal depicting the gods Set and Anubis. He’d seen something about them online. Like one was the god of death and the other was sort of the Devil. Or maybe he’d seen it in a movie. Wherever he’d seen it, Harkhuf’s murder, combined with death and the Devil, reignited his admiration and brought a single word to his lips.
“Badass.”
“What? I missed that,” said Froehlich.
“I said this guy was murdered and now he’s all death’s-heads and devils.”
“Yes. I suppose that is interesting.”
“It’s more than interesting. It’s badass. Harkhuf here is the Ozzy of mummies. That’s how they should advertise him. The darkest, hard-corest, most rock-and-roll mummy of all time.”
Froehlich looked at Gilbert for a minute waiting for the punch line. It didn’t come.
“Oh. You’re serious.”
“Harkhuf, the Metal Mummy. I’m telling you. We could sell a million T-shirts.”
Froehlich nodded, the flicker of despair that lay at the center of his being flaring up like a tire fire. He could think of a dozen occasions when he would have loved to have fired Gilbert. This one made it an even thirteen. But Froehlich knew it was better to put up with someone unqualified to guard a fishbowl than it was to fire him and put the idea that guards were expendable into the board of directors’ heads.
“Those are all interesting ideas, Gilbert,” he said. “Keep them to yourself for now. We don’t want anyone stealing them.”
“Sure. I get it,” Gilbert said, for the first-ever time not wanting his boss to eat pavement directly in front of a steamroller.
Froehlich patted Gilbert’s shoulder. “The crew’re all at lunch. I’ll be back in an hour. You’re on your own till then.”
“You’re going to tell the board about my ideas?”
“Absolutely. First chance I get,” Froehlich said. “Just keep an eye on things here for a while.”
“I won’t let Ozzy out of my sight.”
“Swell,” said Froehlich, heading to his car and the bottle he kept under the passenger seat. It wasn’t that he necessarily needed it, but on a day like this, it kept him from pushing Harkhuf out of his case, closing the lid on himself, and hoping for a swift, deep, dark burial under quiet desert sands.
After a few minutes alone with Ozzy, the Metal Mummy, Gilbert’s keen senses took note of two important things: that he was alone on this floor of the museum and that his stomach was rumbling.
Gilbert had a complicated relationship to food. When he was young, his name had transformed from Gilbert to Gill, and eventually—with the cruel cleverness of children—to Fish. Because of this, and despite the warnings from what amounted to a small stadiumful of doctors, he refused to eat anything that had lived in, been raised near, or might have ever glimpsed a body of water. Because of that, his diet consisted mainly of fried chicken (chickens lived on farms; they couldn’t fly; and they wouldn’t know a lake from a Saturn V), hamburgers (for the same reasons as chickens, plus, unlike chickens, cows didn’t float, so they’d have no interest in water), and pizza (it was docile, immobile, and, for him, resolutely anchovy-free).
Gilbert took a quick look around just to make sure that no one was nearby. While he was indifferent to exercise and, really, motion in general, he sprinted down one floor to the employee lunchroom, where he purchased a bacon cheeseburger from a vending machine. The microwave seemed to take forever heating the damned thing, so he had to spread on the ketchup and mustard while running back upstairs to Ozzy.
He was panting when he got back, but the exhibit room was still deserted. He took a couple of quick bites of the burger before stashing it on a pile of napkins behind a pillar. His plan was to take a bite or two at a time, make sure the coast was clear, then go back for another greasy morsel. This hit-and-run approach to lunch would also give him time to catch his breath. This was important to him because sometimes when he ran, his left arm hurt like a bitch and he didn’t want to look bad in front of Ozzy.
Gilbert went back to the sarcophagus and peered down at the dead man. As he leaned over the lid, trying to get a better look at Set and Anubis, a glop of mustard he’d accidentally squirted onto his uniform during the mad dash upstairs dislodged itself and fell directly onto one of the wax seals binding the mummy’s arms and legs. Gilbert stopped breathing, and for a second, his vision went blank. His chest ached like that time in Little League when a baseball took a bad hop and nailed him right in the nuts. He was perfectly aware that he didn’t have nuts in his chest, but whatever was there felt worse every second as he stared at the mustard in the mummy case.
Gilbert ran back to where he’d stashed the burger, which made him feel even more light-headed, and came back with a fistful of napkins. He wiped frantically at the wax seal, removing every trace of mustard. It came off surprisingly easily, but just as he gave the seal one last swipe, he heard a crack. Gilbert looked down into the case. The seal he’d been wiping, the one by Ozzy’s right hand, had snapped in two and fallen in on itself, like a collapsed bridge. Spurred by panic and what remained of his vague sense of self-preservation, Gilbert thought fast. He tore off a small piece of his napkin, wadded it up, and stuffed it under the broken seal. The two wax halves, now propped back into place, looked pretty good to him. The crack was barely visible. Gilbert took a step back and checked the room. He was still alone. He relaxed for a solid second before the panic slammed back into him.
The hamburger.
It was the last and by far the worst piece of evidence connecting him to the desecration of Ozzy’s corpse.
He went quietly to the pillar where the burger was hidden and wrapped the remaining napkins
tightly around it. He wondered for a minute about the best place to ditch the evidence. There weren’t any trash cans on this floor, and besides, the smell of grease would give him away.
Froehlich’ll flip out if he comes back and I’m gone. But this is a maximum emergency. Time for maximum action.
Gilbert shot finger horns at Ozzy and held the burger behind his back. As he headed for the rear of the museum, back by the sarcophagus, he heard what he told himself was the air-conditioning system coming on. The funny thing was that it also sounded strangely like a low moan.
It was a short walk to the loading dock. The exhibit setup crew was still there, finishing their lunch when Gilbert went by. He smiled to them and sidled up to the big Dumpster at the far end of the dock. Moving the burger carefully around to the front of his body, Gilbert dropped the damning evidence into the piles of boxes and excelsior that almost filled the big bin. As the burger sank beneath the top layer of garbage, his adrenaline dropped a couple of notches and he began to relax. He took a deep gulp of fresh air and burped, tasting microwaved meat at the back of his throat. At that moment, the sweating started again. His chest felt like someone had clamped his insides together with vise grips. Gilbert “Fish” Ferris reached into his pocket for his cigarettes, but never got them. Instead, he fell headfirst into the Dumpster.
Gilbert spent his last few moments on earth under a pile of garbage, staring at the bacon cheeseburger that had done him in, knowing he’d never get a Viking funeral or make it to Disneyland or ever be on TV. As sad as it all was—and on the scale of mortifying ways to die, it was right between “tragic unicycle accident” and “smothered by a blow-up sex doll”—it might have been some small consolation to him if he’d known that the same burger that killed him had done exactly the opposite for Ozzy.
3
It was nighttime in the mail room, but, in the mail room, wasn’t it always night? That’s how it felt to Nelson and it made his blood boil, or whatever passed for blood in his undead veins and arteries. The funny thing about being dead and still on the payroll was that he didn’t feel all that different from when he’d been alive. Sure, he couldn’t get drunk anymore and his mind wandered into homicidal rage territory a bit more frequently, but for the most part, it was everyone else who was different. Basically, as a mail-room mook—the lowest of the low, even by mook standards—you could get away with murder. So to speak.
Someone knocked on the door of Nelson’s dismal broom closet of an office.
“Excuse me, sir.”
Nelson looked up to see Fred McCloud, a mook who’d spent nearly a decade down in the dungeon-like mail room without a promotion, commendation, gold star, pat on the head, or any tangible recognition at all.
All of that made him the best second in command that Nelson could hope for.
“What is it, Fred?” said Nelson in a voice the DOPS So, Now You’re a Manager! manual called “Supportive Indeterminateness.” The manual defined SI as “Encouraging without actually committing to any statement, situation, or idea ever. SI is especially useful to managers of departments consisting of any sentient being, living or undead. Neither is to be trusted. Ever. Hence, commitmentless encouragement.”
McCloud went on, “This memo addressed to Ellis on the seventh floor is two days old, but I found it in the hold box.”
Nelson took the memo and pretended to look it over. He didn’t have to read it. He’d already done that and had slipped it into the hold box himself. God knows what bizarre line of inquiry led McCloud to finding it. Statistically, it was about as likely as a wildebeest writing a paper on a new fusion-reactor design, building the reactor, and then running it with a team of other wildebeests.
“Don’t worry about it, Fred,” said Nelson brightly. “Ellis has come down with a case of the demons, so we’re putting aside some of the less important correspondence until he’s shipshape again.”
McCloud smiled as brightly as Nelson had spoken.
“Got it. Thanks for the heads-up,” he said.
Nelson folded the memo and set it aside. Then he put his index finger on McCloud’s forehead and said, “Macho Taco Guy Lombardo.”
McCloud’s eyes went blank, which was an accomplishment considering mooks’ milky-white eyes.
“Forget about finding this memo,” said Nelson. “In fact, forget about all of Ellis’s mail, memos, and packages. I’ll handle them from now on. But don’t mention that to anyone. Understand?”
“Sure thing, boss,” said McCloud cheerfully.
“Now, you’re going to forget this whole conversation, but you’re going to remember the orders I just gave you.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
“One more thing. Did you put the new haul of Bayliss’s office supplies where I told you?”
McCloud nodded. “In the bin in the hole behind the filing cabinets in your office.”
“Good. When I say the magic words, you’re going to feel really good and get right back to work. You’re not going to remember what we talked about or the office supplies.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Nelson touched McCloud’s forehead. “Macho Taco Guy Lombardo.”
McCloud’s shoulder sagged for a second, then rose back into place. He grinned broadly. “I’m sorry. What did you want to see me about?”
Nelson put a hand on his shoulder and spoke in a tone the manual called “Disinterested Affirmation,” which the manual defined as “Apparent interest in a subordinate’s duties, but with as little actual knowledge of them as possible, thereby constructing a blissful wall of plausible deniability.”
“I just wanted you to know what a great job you’re doing and that you should keep it up.”
“Thanks. I’ll do my best,” said a happy McCloud before heading back to the mail room.
Nelson stared after him. He’d have to keep a better watch on McCloud.
Can’t have the idiot stumbling over every little thing I’m redirecting. I’ll never get anything done and he’ll eventually say the wrong thing to the wrong person . . .
Nelson’s mind drifted pleasantly to all the ways he could murder McCloud without raising anyone’s suspicion. He’d already hypnotized the moron. He could order him to fall into the incinerator where they burned old classified documents. Or stumble into the humongous shredder where they chopped up the documents before they burned them. Or trip under the giant press that mashed the document ashes into little models of the DOPS logo that the agency liked to give to visiting busybodies from Washington.
Or I could just shove a filing cabinet on his head and make it look like it was one of the other mooks . . .
That last idea was very appealing, but became less so the more Nelson considered his position as mail-room manager. Trying to murder Coop is what got him demoted down here in the first place. Another demotion would make his plan even harder to pull off.
He’d already experienced a few setbacks along the way, though nothing he couldn’t handle. Other mooks weren’t the problem. The problem was when some asshole living person would find out about a wayward missive. They’d find it tucked away in a corner or come looking for something Nelson preferred to hold on to. The good news is that no one ever suspected a thing. Nelson covered up the “mistakes” by passing them off as inevitable mook misunderstandings, something he was working to put a stop to. He’d smile and shrug and apologize, and for the most part, everyone was very nice about it. Really, it amazed him, the things you could get away with when you were dead and seen as just fractionally less incompetent than all the other walking corpses around you. All he had to do was hang on, keep holding back certain letters and packages while pushing others through the system, and eventually it would come to him. His Excalibur. His Holy Grail. His first-class ticket to Revenge City.
Then it’ll be payback time. Starting with Bayliss. Then Coop.
There was a gentle knock on his door and McCloud poked his head in.
“What is it?” said Nelson curtly, for a moment forge
tting the manual’s managerial voices.
“There’s been a situation,” McCloud said.
“What kind of situation?”
“It’s Albertson and the shredder.”
“Yes?”
“All that’s left are his feet.”
“Where’s the rest of him?”
McCloud glanced over his shoulder and back to Nelson. “Kind of everywhere.”
Nelson sighed and picked up a bucket he kept next to the filing cabinet. “Get a mop, a shovel, and some tweezers. We’re working overtime tonight.”
“I’ll tell the others,” said McCloud excitedly as he jogged back into the mail room.
Nelson remained in his office for a minute, gathering himself. It wasn’t so much having to spend the rest of the night cleaning bits of Albertson out of the shredder and light fixtures that bothered him; it was that now he couldn’t murder anyone himself. The manual was very clear on that point. No department below field operations was allowed more than one shredding, decapitation, immolation, or consumption of an employee by a hostile entity—human, animal, or cyborg—per quarter. That included mooks. Limbs flying around willy-nilly ruined budgets and lowered morale. Of course, this lowered his morale, but there was nothing Nelson could do about that.
A now mortally depressed Nelson took his bucket out into the mail room knowing absolutely that he couldn’t kill any of his employees for another three months.
4
Coop was still drinking his first cup of coffee of the day when Giselle got a text from the DOPS saying that Woolrich, their boss—really, everybody’s boss—wanted to see them. Coop experienced the usual stab of cold fear that came whenever he had to meet with Woolrich. The feeling was something like the sinking sensation when you’re sent to the principal’s office as a kid, only Coop got the adult version. This consisted mainly of a wild search for cash and his passport. The feeling wasn’t pleasant, he didn’t want to go the meeting, and he spent the next fifteen minutes trying to figure a way out of it. Giselle was no help. She just finished her coffee and got dressed, ignoring him the whole time.