Chapter 2
Shane kept up his sprint, standing up and pedaling furiously, until he got to Townson Street. At Townson he pulled up onto the sidewalk on the left side of the street, letting the bike coast until it slowed to walking speed. He hopped off the bike and started walking, breathing deep and trying to calm himself down. An image of the drunk yuppie’s eyes was in Shane’s head, bloodshot and lifeless. He looked around, trying to force the image out.
Although it was only a few minutes from the homeless-occupied sidewalks of 13th, Townson was a world away in terms of niceness. The city had put a huge amount of money into renovating the first few blocks of the street, widening the sidewalks, repaving the road, even putting in a few trees and benches. It was part of the city’s bid to court new tech start-ups, and coupled with the tax breaks the city had offered to such companies, the bid had been pretty successful. The large, red-brick buildings that lined the first few blocks of Townson now sported flashy signs for companies that hadn’t even existed a few years ago.
ZapPow!, where Shane worked, was one of those companies. It occupied the first building on the street, which it had decorated with a gigantic version of the ZapPow! company logo: a neon pink silhouette of a fluffy kitten, standing on its hind legs, holding an Uzi in each hand. The logo and company name were repeated, in smaller form, on the double smoked-glass doors of the entrance. Shane didn’t bother to look as he passed. He hurried to the end of the building and ducked into a dead-end alley there.
Ten feet down the alley was a plain metal door. Shane fumbled in his pocket for his keycard and dipped the card into the slot beside the door. The lock whirred, and Shane jerked the door open. He grabbed his bike and hurried down a short, bare-walled hallway, using his keycard again to get into the first door on the left.
A motion sensor switched the lights on, revealing a small room crowded with a large table and chairs and a row of lockers across the back wall. Shane leaned his bike against the table and hurried to the back of the room, where the time clock sat on another, smaller table beside a little microwave. He snatched his paper timecard from the wall holder and jammed it into the machine, letting out a breath as the machine clunked his start-time for the day. He held the card up in the fluorescent light.
“Four o’ seven,” he said. “More than five minutes late. Probably get called by the boss on Monday, for that.”
He dropped his timecard back into its slot in the wall-holder. Then, on a whim, he lifted another card out of its slot and looked at it.
“Terrance Jones. Four a.m. on the dot, every day for the past four days.” Shane shook his head, irked. He often worked the same shift as Terrance, and he’d never seen his co-worker anytime before five in the morning. “How does he do it?”
No time to wonder about it now. The kitchen needed to be cleaned before the cook got there at six, and since Terrance was never around to help him, Shane had to do it all on his own. To make matters worse, today he was running late.
The image of the drunk yuppie’s dead eyes burned in Shane’s brain again. He shook his head, forcing his mind back to the work he needed to do.
He went to his locker, spun the code into the padlock, and jerked it open. He kicked off his sneakers, reaching for a pair of coveralls hanging inside the locker. He pulled the coveralls on over his jeans, slipped his arms into the sleeves without taking off his flannel, zipped up the long zipper in the front. He jammed his feet into his steel-toe work boots, tied up the laces. He grabbed a pair of rubber gloves, folded them together and shoved them into his left front pocket.
The last piece of gear was the key ring. ZapPow! prided itself on being a state-of-the-art, cutting-edge tech start-up. But when it came to the cleaning staff, it was strictly old school: paper timecards, a clunky time clock, and the key ring.
There was a key for every janitor’s closet on every floor, and in every bathroom, and for every padlock that secured something the cleaners had to use, like the trash compactor or the dumpsters in the basement. There were so many keys that the spring in the retractable keychain couldn’t cope with the weight, leaving the keys to dangle from half a foot of chain hanging out of the coil housing.
Shane picked the key ring off the locker’s top shelf, slipped it through the pocket slit on the coverall’s right side, and clipped it to the belt loop on his hip. A fat wad of keys, hanging at his thigh.
“Like a fucking ball and chain,” Shane muttered, and sighed.
He thought of the bike ride to work that morning, before he’d found the dead-eyed yuppie. He thought of the squeaking chain and the moon behind the blanket of fog, of Kerouac and Ferlinghetti. He thought of Honey Guts, still unfinished, and of how he was turning thirty next month.
“I’ll give two weeks on Monday, when the boss is here,” he said to the empty room. “I’ll save every cent I earn before my last day, won’t even buy beer. And then I’ll get the fuck out of San Francisco, go back to Arcata, crash on couches, and write. I’ll fucking finish Honey Guts before I’m thirty one.”
He nodded his head, feeling better than he’d felt in a long time. More focused. Stronger.
He walked back out the door of the room and turned left down the hallway, came to the door to the ZapPow! lobby. Even as he came near the door, Shane could hear the noise coming from the room beyond: a nonstop, blaring mix of the most up-to-the-moment popular music, an incongruous blend of heavily-produced club rap, emotionally-overwrought alternative rock, and jangling pseudo folk. He took hold of the door handle and felt it pulsing with vibrations from the music. He opened the door and walked through.
On the other side of the door was the ZapPow! lobby. Smoked glass and stainless steel everywhere. Enlarged cutouts of cartoon animals holding semi-automatic weapons—various characters from ZapPow! games—scattered around like a disorganized mob. A circular front desk in the center of the room with a truly enormous video screen hanging from the ceiling above it.
Shane glanced up at the screen, hardly paying attention at first, intent on getting where he was going. But a half second later something clicked in his head. He stopped walking, raised his eyes, and stared.
There was none of the whirling motion, the frenetic jerky movements, of the ZapPow! first-person shooters. There was none of the cartoon-ish, God’s-view panoramas of the ZapPow! strategy games.
Instead there was a single static image. The stillness of it, in a place where Shane was accustomed to seeing frantic motion, made it all the more forceful.
It was a close-up on a man’s eyes, bloodshot and intense.