By: P.A. O’Neil
When Maurice found out Jon got laid off he was shaken up. Not because he liked Jon as a person — Jon actually annoyed the hell out of Maurice — but because Jon was so good at his job. If Jon was on the chopping block, none of them were safe. Little did Maurice know it wasn’t just his job that was in jeopardy.
Pete, a jovial guy fresh out of college, was the one who broke the news. When Pete heard Maurice walk to his desk, he popped up like a whack-a-mole, to tell him. Maurice hadn’t even started his computer yet.
“Jon? Why?” Asked Maurice.
“I don’t know. Anne walked by his cubicle and the cleaning people were over there clearing out his stuff.”
Like Jon, Maurice didn’t really like Anne either. She walked around with her shoes off as if the fourth floor was her living room. This disgusted Maurice, not just because it was disrespectful — it was — but because it was very unsanitary.
The fourth floor of the Kirklin and Greenfield building was basically an open floor plan with what looked like an asbestos-laden ceiling. The cubicles for the Service Resource Center (Maurice’s department) were all pushed against the windowed wall on the north side. The opposite side of the building was a hardhat area where crews were constantly banging away, severely hurting the Service Resource Center’s ability to field customer service calls. Between the cubicles and the construction area on the south side were offices for SRC management, and exiles from Accounting and Marketing. It was well known that this was where the unwanted’s roamed free — Napoleon’s Elba.
The office walls were paper thin. So much so, that nobody was allowed to hang any pictures up on their stud-less walls. The result was a desolate room of beige isolation where nobody was comfortable making private phone calls. The SRC people left them alone, as if they had leprosy, and conversing with the exiled doomed you to staying on the fourth floor forever.
Sandwiched between the offices were the restrooms and “kitchen” — a fridge next to an Ikea conference table. Said table had one toaster, a coffee pot, and a microwave — all attached to a single surge protector. It was a sad place.
John stood up in his cubicle, Pete in his, talking as one does in corporate America with their colleagues, awkwardly, with a small divider wall between them.
“Jon must have been upset, he didn’t even pack his Funko pops.”
“He didn’t?” This was strange, Jon had quite a Funko pop collection at his desk. Whenever Maurice walked by he positioned the Black Panther one just so and talked about how much he loved the movie, Black Panther. In fact, that was all Jon talked about with Maurice, it was the only thing Jon thought they had in common. But Maurice wasn’t really into comic book movies so he just smiled and said he’d seen it once. He wanted to ask Jon if he assumed he liked Black Panther because Maurice was black. But that would have frazzled Jon so he just let him be.
“You think they’re doing company-wide layoffs?” Asked Pete, he was new to corporate Machiavellism and nervous but excited in a young soldier fresh out of boot camp kind of way.
“No. Not that I know of.”
“You think anyone would mind if I took the Baby Yoda Funko Pop?”
“I don’t know man, I’d check with Steve.”
Steve was the manager, he was pretty useless but if you ran something by him you could at least say you went to management.
“Yeah good call, CYA… Cover your ass.”
“Yeah, I know what you meant.” Maurice put his headphones on to signal Pete that the conversation was over. He sat at his cubicle, set his task tracker to “Scheduling and Reports” and tried to get some work done. But who was he kidding, his job was probably on the line, so he mostly did a half-assed job search on LinkedIn for the next hour.
The whole morning, the department’s Slack channel was blowing up about Jon. Every few seconds he could hear the knock sound from Slack on his computer followed by a Slack alert on his phone in chorus.
The conversation was as mindless as the people:
•••
Maurice changed his task tracker to “personal time / Restroom,” and walked by Jon’s desk on his way to the men’s room.
People had picked Jon’s cubicle clean like vultures. He’d never seen anyone so excited about a stapler before. It was a red Office Space Swingline but still, the man just got let go.
Disgusted, Maurice returned to his cubicle and polished his resume until lunchtime.
•••
Maurice put his computer on “lunch” and the 1-hour countdown commenced. When he first started working at Kirklin and Greenfield, he would rush back to his desk and get back on the phones before the clock was out. But after he realized he wasn’t getting paid for that hour whether he ate at his desk or not, he started taking his sweet ass time. Sometimes in defiance, Maurice would put his task tracker in “Meeting” or “Bathroom” which totally messed with Steve’s tracking metrics.
The cafeteria felt like high school all over again. But the only place nearby to eat was a Dave and Busters and going there at lunchtime was just sad. Maurice spotted the table the people from his department sat at, like high school nobody mixed or mingled with other cliques, and to do so would cause much drama.
“Hey Mo.” It was Brandon, Maurice hated when people called him Mo, his friends called him Reese. Nobody at work called him Reese.
“You hear about Jon? I was in the SRC and I got the lowdown from Janice that he was 86’d last night.” Maurice liked Brandon but he never knew what the hell he was talking about.
“You think they’re gonna have another round of layoffs?” That was Madeline, she was new to the company. She came in one week before the hiring freeze and three weeks before they laid off a quarter of the company. She was like a child growing up during wartime, all she knew was danger. Perhaps that was best for a young worker at Kirklin and Greenfield. Best to learn young.
“If they’re having layoffs, why would they get rid of Jon? And why only Jon? He’s one of the best workers we’ve had. He was like, Team Member of the month what? 6 weeks running?”
“They didn’t just lay off Jon. Franklin was let go too.”
Franklin was also fresh out of college, he came in the same time as Madeline. “Maybe he quit,” said Madeline, hopeful. If Franklin got let go, everyone could tell she was doing the mental math that she’d be next.
•••
After lunch, Maurice sat at his desk and looked out the window. The Kirklin and Greenfield building was the tallest in the office park; the building adjacent had an HR staffing agency, the one that hooked Maurice up with his job at K&G two years ago. There was a chiropractor, a physical therapist, a tailor, and a medium-sized office space that various companies came and went through like a revolving door. Most of those companies were Ponzi schemes—or at least Ponzi adjacent. They all seemed to have the word “funnel” in the name. Which was fitting, they funneled money out of people’s pockets.
It was now Friday, the typical day to let people go, but no new sacrificial lambs were slaughtered that day. Instead, just a handful of people came in the morning on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, like Jon and Franklin did on Monday, and they were never seen again. As if swallowed by fog and only remembered in stories from oldtimers about “that guy” or when one looked at the puppy wall calendar they swiped from the dearly departed’s desk.
Maurice stared at his task tracker, waiting for it to tell him to go home. When the clock hit 5:30 PM and it was officially the weekend he would go home, take a shower, and meet up with some people at The Tankard. He’d be meeting with co-workers but they all lived by the rule not to talk or think about Kirklin and Greenfield until the following Monday when their alarms went off.
It was 4:45 PM when the company-wide email blared from everyone’s desktop. The same stupid sound bellowed from monitor to monitor in chorus. It was from Thom Kirkland, CEO, they were to have an all-hands meeting the following week.
Maurice had a feeling they would all be talking about the all-hands at The Tankard.
•••
Maurice parked his car and debated whether or not to go into The Tankard, a shithole dive bar in Norfolk Square. It was karaoke night. Maurice hated karaoke night and he never understood why they would do it on a Friday, that was mid-week bar shit.
But that wasn’t the problem. He knew everyone was going to talk about work and truth be told if they all got laid off, or the company went under, he didn’t give a shit. A friend of his from college told him about the start-up he worked for that went under; they paid his last checks by giving him a laptop, a nice leather desk chair, and his work phone as severance. And to Maurice, that all sounded pretty nice.
Some guy in a cowboy hat was crucifying a Beatles song when Maurice walked in. The next one sang an Oingo Boingo song and wasn’t half bad. Sadly, he was the best performance for the night. Maurice almost left when a guy was murdering (and not in a good way) Raspberry Beret by Prince when Linda from HR showed up.
Linda from HR was an HR nightmare. She wore patchouli oil and hit on the younger men in the company. Once she grabbed Maurice’s ass after a sexual harassment lecture and said she was “just testing him.” She only hired young attractive people and then would ask them where they were going every Friday. The answer always being either The Tankard or The Ale House. The two bars close by.
“Linda, would you tell us if you knew though. You would be sworn to secrecy or something,” said Peter.
Linda’s eyes got mischievous, she bit her lip and tilted her head down while looking up at Peter like an innocent schoolgirl, “Rules were meant to be broken. But if I were to tell ya it would cost ya.”
Peter looked un-easy and offered to buy another pitcher of Miller Lite. Nobody objected.
“Really though Linda, what’s this all-hands thing about?”
“You guys are no fun. We’re having a cookout! It’s the first Summer Kickoff Cookout since the board of directors went to prison for embezzlement.”
“Oh awesome, that’s not bad at all!” Said Peter, placing the pitcher down at the table. “I’ve never been to a corporate party.”
“They get pretty rowdy,” said Linda with a wink.
Maurice got up to talk to an old high school friend he recognized at the bar, leaving Peter to try to navigate that minefield alone.
•••
Pete was double fisting burgers when Maurice finally made it outside to the parking lot where the “Summer Kickoff Cookout” was located. In the distance, he spotted his car and the freedom it symbolized. Pete waved with his half-eaten burger. Spotted, and with nobody better to talk to, Maurice headed towards Pete and the mound of charred and rubbery burgers.
Roger came up behind them. “This is the lamest summer kickoff I’ve been to.”
“It’s better than working.” Said Pete with a mouthful of food.
“Please. Before the board of directors went to prison for embezzlement we had catering and free booze. We had entertainment, Foreigner performed one year. Thin Lizzy another.”
“Wow,” said Maurice, feigning surprise and knowledge of who the hell Thin Lizzy was.
“Now it’s hockey puck burgers in a fucking parking lot and that kid from the marketing department ‘DJ-ing’.” Roger slugged the rest of his Fanta and crushed the can in disgust, walking off to find the nearest trash can.
The kid from marketing started to play Nelly’s Hot in Here, Maurice took that as his cue to leave. As he walked towards the building, towards spreadsheets and all of the bullshit he did for a meager paycheck, the mechanic whir of a helicopter got louder and louder. Maurice turned around, his chinos billowing from the wind the helicopter spewed on the crowd below.
A plate of plastic cutlery and napkins exploded off the table first. Then the hamburger buns. Followed by the burgers themselves. All cascading down to the ground in a fury of napkins and other debris from the parking lot.
The helicopter parked, the blades wound to a halt, and the CEO of Kirklin and Greenfield, Thom Bradford Kirklin (Paul Greenfield died long ago), disembarked from the helicopter.
Kirklin looked in the direction of the DJ from Marketing, who was still playing Get Low by Lil’ Jon at a pretty excessive volume. He tried to turn it off, but his computer froze so he just resorted to unplugging the cord from his laptop. Lil Jon played on from his laptop speakers but it was faint.
Thom Kirkland cleared his throat.
“As you all know, we have been going through a lot of legal difficulties over the past few months.”
This got some nods from the older people in the crowd. Some murmured about the rounds of layoffs and pay freezes the minions at Kirklin and Greenfield had felt over the past three years, since the entire board of directors went to prison and somehow Thom Kirkland came out on the other side cleaner than a bottle of bleach.
“I want to thank you personally for all you had to put up with during this trying time. The pay freezes, the lack of bonuses, the hiring freezes, doing more than one person’s job, and not getting so much as a title bump. You’ve put up with a lot.”
This was it. Maurice was actually excited to hear what was going to be said at this particular “all hands” meeting. He was setting them up for good news! The rich bastard was finally going to extend an olive branch to his underpaid underlings.
Kirkland continued, “That’s what makes what I’m about to say so, so, hard.”
Sonofabitch! Thought Maurice, along with everyone else present. Bull market. Bear market. I didn’t matter, the little guy was getting short-changed. At least at K&G.
“After today, we are going to be laying off a majority of you. Essential workers will stay on, but, unfortunately, many of you will be let go. I wish you all the very best of luck. You’re gonna need it.” And with that, Thom Kirkland boarded the helicopter and flew off in the direction of Boca Raton where he spent his winters and a good chunk of summer with his mistress.
In the excitement, amongst the angry workers, cuss words, and loud helicopter motor; no one realized that the gate to the parking lot was raised. Nobody was going to go home tonight.
•••
Back in the Service Resource Center, the people were losing it. It was as close to mayhem as a corporate environment could get. Bedlam in beige.
Anne was running around like a Hobbit on Mordor, shoeless and ready to pounce. “They can’t fire us! We’re the service resource center, we service the customers! Without us, what will they do?”
“We mostly just schedule the technicians Anne, they’ll probably have some automated AI system take care of that,” countered Madeline.
“That’s bullshit! Machines can’t take our jobs!”
“That’s what the Luddites said.” That was Bill, Maurice always thought he was too smart for the SRC. Everyone starred at Bill for a second and then resumed shouting. Maurice and Peter were going around quietly putting office supplies and snacks from the “kitchen” in their bags. They were getting severance one way or another.
Steve tried to maintain order. He stood by the window between the cubicles and the meeting room inexplicably named “Dunwich.” A name nobody knew exactly how to pronounce. Whenever they were supposed to have meetings with the work from home people on Zoom or one-on-ones with managers, Steve would mumble the pronunciation to “We have a meeting-n-done-itch.” He stood there next to the room he could not pronounce, in front of people he hardly knew, trying to channel his inner William Wallace and inspire the crowd.
“QUIET! We all have to calm down. Kirkland never said we were going to get laid off. This may be good for us. You see in most corporate layoffs, the lowest paid… usually stays and takes on more responsibility. This could be beneficial for all of us.”
“So that means you’ll get fired and we’ll all stay.”
“Now, I didn’t say that. I was merely saying that—”
“Computers are gonna take our jobs!” Interrupted Anne.
“It’s the internet’s fault!” Roger blamed the internet, politicians, and young people for most of society’s ills. This was the second time Maurice had heard Roger blame the internet for something that week, and it was only a Tuesday.
Steve took a deep breath, he was rearing back and ready to give them some sound advice. Leaders are born in times of strife and dammit, this was Steven Presley Chauvin’s time to shine. He didn’t get his Six Sigma Certification or spend all that money on those Dale Carnegie courses for nothing.
“I want you all to realize that—”
SMASH
Glass shattered. Maurice stood like a deer in the headlights looking on as what looked like a green giant squid’s tentacles crashed into the SRC and grabbed Steve like an elephant snatching a peanut with its trunk. The tentacles gave Steve a squeeze and he exploded like a rotten tomato.
Blood splattered across the glass walls to Dunwich like a tween’s vomit off a tilt-a-whirl. It was then that Maurice wished he took them up on that work-from-home offer.
People were running around but Maurice just stood there. It wasn’t until a gust of wind blowing through the now broken window hit Maurice on the face and snapped him out of it. He looked around. Anne was running shoeless across broken glass, like Bruce Willis in Die Hard. A trail of blood followed her as she zig-zagged in no particular direction or sense of purpose. Her arms were rigid, by her side while she ran, making her look like an out-of-step Irish step dancer.
Peter paced the room, with both hands in his hair he kept saying “fuck” rapid-fire as if he was trying to say it the most times in a minute for a Guinness World Record.
Suddenly the tentacle re-appeared. It dipped its tip in Anne’s blood trail and followed the blood right to her, she turned around right before the hideous arms of whatever the hell this monster was grabbed her. She tried to fight it, but it was no use. She was sucked out of the same window Steve had exited.
“We’ve got to get the fuck out of here!” Shouted Maurice. “Everybody, run to the stairs!”
“Fuh-fuh-fuh-fuh” Peter was pacing, he looked up at Maurice, they locked eyes. In a flash of green, Peter was out the window leaving only his footprints in Anne’s blood.
The only time anybody used the stairs was in January when the company had the “Biggest Loser” competition and gave cash prizes to the top employees who had lost weight. Maurice never participated in that bullshit, but he had a vague understanding of where the stairs were. They were where the construction people were working on the other half of the floor. He grabbed Madeline and followed Brandon to the stairs when Roger walked into their path as calm as a college professor on sabbatical.
“Oh, no, you don’t. I’m to make sure everyone stays right where they are.” He pulled out a gun and cocked it, “You’re squid food, fuckers.”
“What are you talking about?” Cried Madeline.
“Old Man Kirkland himself told me to keep an eye on this floor, make sure nobody leaves, and then I will survive this round of layoffs.”
“Layoffs? People are getting killed!”
He leveled the gun in Maurice’s direction. “You know it’s attracted to blood? Whatever it is, it has a taste for blood. If I—”
Brandon punched Roger in the face, his nose exploded like a strawberry in a microwave. Brandon straddled Roger and beat his face in, really letting out his aggression. Before Maurice could tell him to stop a tentacle came in and took them both away in a flash. Too bad, Maurice liked Brandon.
Maurice and Madeline stood there amongst the power tools and saw horses, in a daze. Maurice said, “Alright, let’s dip.”
They took the stairs to the lobby. Streaks of blood on the floor and walls, broken glass, and splintered office furniture told them all they needed to know — it wasn’t just the fourth floor getting executed today. They quietly went through the front door, formerly glass, now just a shattered throughway.
The parking lot was a mass of upturned cars and carnage. The only thing left from the Summer Kickoff BBQ unscathed was the DJ booth, which was still playing that kid from Marketing’s “Summer Trax” mix. As if this were some cosmic joke and the beast only spared the unholy.
It wasn’t until they got to the gates that Maurice dared look back. What he saw was an incredible sight. Roger called it a squid, he wasn’t far off. Except squid bodies are long cylinders, this thing’s body — if you’d call it that — was a blob. Like a fatty mass or a giant amoeba. The beast’s body would latch onto the building like a barnacle. Instead of eight tentacles like a squid, this thing had at least fifty, from what Maurice could tell. But they wouldn’t stay fixed, they would come in and out of the blob and odd places all over its body, making it impossible to know for sure just how many tentacles there were.
The tentacles would leap out of the thing’s body like a solar flare coming off the sun, grab a person and pull them screaming into the blob. From there, Maurice didn’t want to know what happened to them. (Editors note. What happened to them is this: Upon entry of the beast, they would break through the outer exoskeleton like a finger going through a Jell-o mold. Inside this Jell-o-mold-like body was acid much like that of a human’s stomach. If the people were still alive they would slowly dissolve at an excruciatingly slow rate. Electricity generated by these “feedings” would render the dissolving people paralyzed. So, there was no escape. It was a slow and painful death).
The gates were closed but there was a part of the fence that was crushed after the beast got a little overzealous with a Nissan Maxima. The Maxima lay on its back like an upturned turtle with the crushed fence beneath it. Maurice helped Madeline over the fence first. One leg went over the fence’s crushed cross-bar, but when she put her other leg over it got cut on some twisted steel. Her pants tore, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was the cut on her leg, blood glistening in the moonlight.
The sound from behind them grew quiet, the beast stopped wreaking havoc on the K&G building and bounded across the parking lot at astounding speed.
Maurice hopped the fence and grabbed Madeline by her sportcoat. They ran down the street toward the now empty office space that formerly housed UpClick Funnel Inc.
He grabbed one of their swag bandanas and tied her leg tight. Then he found some bubble wrap and cellophane and tied them around the bandage. The Beast never visited the empty Office Space that night. It was too busy with the poor souls in the K&G office tower but that didn’t stop Maurice and Madeline from having a sleepless night.
It wasn’t just fear that kept Maurice awake all night. He was wide awake with rage. Kirkland put a goofy necklace on Roger and who knows who else on the other floors and told them to make sure nobody escaped. It was Thom Kirkland who brought this on everyone. The CEO had just murdered his entire workforce, and Maurice was ready to exact revenge.
•••
Maurice had never been to Florida and from what he had surmised from social media it was just a bunch of rednecks drinking Budweiser, wearing red hats, and shooting off fireworks in their bare hands. So it goes without saying that the opulence of this neighborhood in Boca Raton that Thom Bradford Kirkland lived in surprised Maurice quite a bit.
This was the kind of neighborhood where a Tesla was the poor family’s car. Every driveway had at least one polished Rolls Royce or Bentley and a beat-up Toyota Tacoma in the service entrance filled with landscaping gear. Every house in the gated cul-de-sac had at least one golf cart and riding privileges onto the thirty-six hole links-style golf course where the dress code stated that all men’s shirts must have collars with one exception, mock turtlenecks may be worn at lunch during golf season (April 13 – October 5). Every home had at least five bathrooms and one elevator. There wasn’t a Dale Earnhardt number three in sight.
Kirkland’s mansion was styled like a Tuscan villa. Brick-red Spanish tile roofing popped in contrast with the pale yellow stucco walls. The main house was from the 1920s but the left and right wings of the house were add-ons from the opulent 80s, paid for with cocaine money. The two new wings stretched outward like a goalpost; with a pool, garden, tennis, and basketball courts in the courtyard.
Maurice walked the perimeter figuring it was best to go through the back. The security so far was surprisingly lax. Truth be told, security saw Maurice, but figured he was just one of the landscapers and let him be.
As he walked past the pool there was a bronzed woman in a white one-piece swimsuit, wide-brimmed hat, and sunglasses — sipping a rosé and getting toasted in more ways than one. It wasn’t even noon yet and she was soaking in her breakfast of vitamin D and wine.
Maurice saw her and froze. He assumed this was Kirkland’s wife (but, he assumed wrong — it was his mistress, Lexi). He also assumed that she would freak out upon seeing a strange black man in her backyard. White women tended to do that. He stood there in an athletic stance, ready to spring forward and run away once she started screaming. But he was again wrong, she simply raised her glass to him like she was making a toast at a party and took a sip of her rosé. So he kept walking and went inside.
Once inside the temperature plunged. There was no air conditioning on but the tile floors and incredible cross breeze made the house an enviable habitat to escape the humidity that was Florida in June. The sudden change in temperature made Maurice sweat more, his brows were dripping and his shirt clung to his back.
Thom Bradford Kirkland stood in the living room at the bar cart. He had a Collins glass with a vodka screwdriver in his hand, white polo, and navy blue shorts on. He had just come off the back nine and finished the day two under par. He was feeling really good about himself and half in the bag when he saw Maurice.
“Oh hello. Is it already time to pay you guys for the month? Time flies huh?”
“What?”
“You work for Jose?”
It was then that realized this guy and his wife must have thought Maurice was one of the help, why else would he be in the living room? Since he came to Florida with no plan besides the plan to wing it, he decided to play along. “Oh, yeah. Uh. Si, señor. Uh, dinero time.”
“Dinero time. I like that.” Kirkland turned to head out of the room, presumably to get some dinero. As soon as he turned, Maurice grabbed the bottle of Titos off the bar cart and clocked him in the back of the head. The bottle didn’t shatter so he calmly put it back on the bar cart, wiped off his prints on the handle with his shirt, and picked up Thom Kirkland. Maurice had him over his shoulder like a fireman when Kirkland’s mistress walked in. She dropped her wine glass on the tile floor. Maurice looked up at her and said, “I think you should go.”
She didn’t need to hear anything else, all she said was “I’ll pack my bags.” Twenty minutes later Kirkland was awake, sweating through his Lacoste polo. He was tied up and gagged on the couch while Maurice helped Lexi with the last of her bags. She had filled up the trunk and back seats of her Tesla Model X, Maurice figured most of that stuff was not hers, but he didn’t care.
Maurice went back to Kirkland, whose eyes darted back and forth like he was watching a furious ping pong match. “I know you sicked that giant squid thing on us at K-an-G so don’t fuckin’ deny it. All I want to know is how and why.”
He ripped off the duct tape covering his mouth and Kirkland let out a pathetic wounded wail. The sound bounced through the living room, off the marble walls and the tile floor as if they were in a cave.
Maurice put the duct tape back on his mouth, “That’s not the fuckin’ answer I was looking for. If you scream, I will knock you out and when you wake up you’ll be short a nutsac. Do you understand me?”
Kirkland nodded, sweat was dripping down his face like he just played one-on-one against Jordan. The faint sound of weed whackers and leafblowers were in the distance, otherwise, it was just the quiet of a very large mansion. Maurice removed the tape a second time.
“Listen, I have money. I can pay yuh—” Maurice put the tape over his mouth again.
“I don’t give a fuck. About money. I just want to know what that fucking thing was and why you murdered everyone in your company. OK?”
Kirkland nodded again, this time faster than before. Maurice removed the tape a third time. It was losing its stickiness and he figured if this guy didn’t give him a proper answer this time he would have to tear off a new piece. Luckily, Kirkland got the assignment this time around.
“It’s a secret society. Certain elite people, executive types like me, meet and have a purge of sorts every quarter. We need to sacrifice workers for our bottom line.”
“Bottom line? Jesus Christ.”
“Usually its just a few people here and there, but with inflation, and the need from our board members to continue to show growth, we had to get drastic.”
“We? Who’s we?”
“Well, just look at the Dow, or FAANG — really most major corporations have one person on the board of the Sons of Arkham.”
“This like a Batman thing?”
“No! We don’t dress up in goofy costumes.”
“We’ll let’s see, I think you need to summon them for a last-minute board meeting.”
They left his house under the cover of darkness. Just Maurice and Thom Kirkland in an empty rental car. Maurice didn’t rob him, he wasn’t a thief.
•••
They showed up at the Sons of Arkham board meeting, the other members were wearing funny costumes. The room had square foot tiles radiating off a circular tile the size of a manhole in the center of the room. Above the manhole was a glass ceiling, with glass and steel like a victorian greenhouse. The whole place seemed like it came out of the Gilded Age right down to the altar on the far side of the room. The hooded figures all looked at Maurice and Thom as they entered, their footsteps echoing on the hard tiled floor.
“Ah, Maurice we were expecting you.” The men (and one woman) were all wearing hoods but he could recognize most, they were all well-known CEOs of major corporations around the world. Some had flown in outer space on private rockets, others made half-hearted attempts to run for public office in the past.
“How did you know I was coming?”
“The Oracle told us, she can see the future. She’s also the only one who can speak with Gwarloth when it’s in its Godlike state.” The man motioned towards a woman in a sheer dress. She looked like a hippie goddess, sitting like a yogi in the lotus pose with a pack of tarot cards in front of her.
“There’s always one sacrificial lamb that proves worthy. Proves they are a wolf and not a sheep.”
“So this was a test?”
“No. This was for profit, we need to keep Gwarloth happy with human sacrifices. But this right here, what we’re offering you, is a business proposition.”
“I come here with a gun and you want to conduct business with me?”
“It wouldn’t do anything to a god, like Gwarloth. Your gun is impotent in his presence. That is our security.”
This was when Thom Kirkland piped up, “As you know K&G is in a state of transformation,” he said this with a smile. “You witnessed our layoffs to make us look more manageable for a merger with America First International.” He pointed to the man he assumed was CEO of America First International. Maurice thought the name was a bit of an oxymoron but kept quiet. The Oracle hippie giggled, he had a feeling she was reading his mind. The others took his silence as a sign he was intrigued, which he was.
“We’ll make you one of us, you start out as COO of AFI and if you play your cards right, you’ll be CEO of one of our conglomerates someday.”
“Whoa, whoa, I thought I was gonna be COO after the merger, Bob. That was the deal,” interrupted Kirkland. He was no longer worried about Maurice’s gun and now in boss man mode.
“And then Mo arrived and proved himself stronger than you. No, Thom. You’re retiring.”
Suddenly a giant tentacle ripped through the glass ceiling and grabbed Kirkland. There was a crunch, a squishy sound, and then he was gone. A decent pool of blood was all Thom Kirkland left behind. His blood flowed into the grout between the tile on the floor and onto the circular tile at the center. The blood seemed to defy gravity and friction as it flowed to the circular tile at a fast rate.
“So, are you on board Mo?”
“I guess I don’t have much of a choice.”
“You won’t regret it, you’ll be richer and more powerful than you can imagine. And nerds will defend your honor on Twitter, no matter what you do or say.”
“But first you must pass the initiation.”
“What do I have to do?”
“You have to make love to Gwarloth.”
“How am I supposed to do that?” Maurice was thinking of the amorphous blob latched onto the K&G building. He’d rather fuck Gwarloth’s mouthpiece in the see-through sundress. “How can I fuck that thing?”
“Oh no, no, no. You don’t fuck Gwarloth. It fucks you.”
The words “it fucks you” hung in the air like a fart with serious hang time. Just wafting there while Maurice processed. Thinking, with those giant tentacles?
“Not with the tentacles.” Said the hippie girl. “It takes the human form to perform this act. But after, the mouthpiece in the sundress is all yours.” She said the last part with a smile to the bewilderment of all others present except Maurice, who simply blushed.
•••
Gwarloth’s head came out of the blood tile first, a goatee’d face with a sinister smile. His eyebrows were thick and formed a perfect V in the center of his head, bringing your attention down to a body built like Conan the Barbarian. He looked like a caricature of the devil, minus the horns and tail.
When Maurice saw below the waist he let out a groan and everyone laughed. Maurice had seen girls whose thighs had less girth than this appendage about to fuck Maurice. This, man, god, whatever’s, dick was standing at attention. As he made his way up through the manhole, it hit the lip of the hole and let out a noise like a gong. The tile that it hit cracked a little. Maurice kept thinking about the prospect of not having to worry about paying rent. They said he was going to be rich but that’s all he could comprehend being rich was, not worrying about rent on his one-bedroom apartment.
The rest was kind of a blur for Maurice, there was an altar, he assumed he would be bent over. Next to the altar were two candles about 2 feet tall on top of four-foot candle holders.
The room got dark, clouds suddenly appeared above the glass ceiling and a torrent of rain and lightning came down through the hole the tentacle ripped Kirkland out of.
The others got in a circle around the altar and kneeled; swaying and chanting some incoherent words of worship. Their robes soaking wet.
Gwarloth disrobed Maurice and the chanting got louder and faster, as if they were on the verge of climax themselves.
Maurice thought of something, and heard the hippie girl cry out “No!” She had read his mind and came to the conclusion before he did, but her reaction told him all he needed to know: If this thing was now a man, he could kill it.
The chanting stopped, Maurice grabbed the base of the candle holder, hit it against the stone altar, splintering it into two very sharp pieces of wood, and stabbed the man in the abdomen with the part he was holding.
The man looked at Maurice in disbelief, never in the thousands of years Gwarloth had been in contact with humans — from ancient Egypt and Rome to the British Empire, to this moment in America — had he ever encountered a man not take the money. He was experiencing feelings he had never felt, confusion and pain clouded his thoughts as he stood there bleeding from his stomach.
Maurice put his thoughts to rest, he stabbed the man in the neck. The God of Commerce died choking on his own blood.
That’s when the recession started.
