LZR-1143: Within

Acknowledgements.

I once worked in this building.

I credit that life with inspiring my love of horror and horrible, horrible things.

So, this is dedicated to anyone working a depressing, soul-crushing job.

May the zombies come for you first and eat quickly.

And thanks to Evan for ensuring that my soul-crushing hit the right note.

LZR-1143: Within

A Novella

of the

LZR-1143 Series

By:

Bryan James

Published by Bryan James.

Copyright 2012, Bryan James.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events or places is purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

LZR-1143: Within

There are more than three hundred water bottling facilities on the Eastern Seaboard alone.

Each facility is privately owned and operated, controlled by boards of directors in distant cities with a distant appreciation for the circumstances that allow these plants to operate.

They are staffed by local employees, with management often dispatched from the corporate centers in Chicago, Atlanta, and other massive corporate hubs.

They employ an average of two hundred workers per plant. An average of seventy-five line operators, fifty machinists, thirty quality control specialists, ten marketing and branding engineers and specialists, ten accountants, ten managers, fourteen janitorial staff, and one operational security manager. In other words, one person responsible for controlling the security of each plant that processes tens of thousands of bottles of drinking water for tens of thousands of people.

Every day.

Of every week.

Power plants, airports, train stations, and even bus stations have more robust security than bottled water facilities. Even reservoirs and waste water plants have local government buy-in and oversight, motivated by a belief that drinking water and water supplies are inviolable and vital to local and national security.

But bottled water is a business. And regulations kill business.

Or so it was said.

In each of these plants, the single security officer may watch several monitors with half an eye or stroll lazily through the facility. He might watch the machines form the bottles and roll mechanically to the labeling machine. He would stroll past hundreds of workers, recognizing a few, and disregarding new or unfamiliar faces. He could absently observe the massive machines funnel purified water from huge vats in the ceilings into clear plastic bottles. He may yawn, having seen it several hundred times already.

Case by case, they roll out, passing under the heavy-lidded eyes of quality control specialists, whose job it is to ensure the labels are straight and the caps are sealed. They cannot check the quality of the water. There are too many, and they are not, after all, chemists.

Case by case, these bottles are sealed and labeled and loaded on trucks.

The single security officer returns to his office, and sits down.

Case by case, every day, the bottles of water move across the country.

In New York City, on just one of those days, it is early morning.

It is, in fact, a beautiful morning.

The daily accumulation of chemical and mineral particulates that commonly and routinely form smog above the city have not yet had the chance to aggregate into a cohesive cloud. The sun has not risen so far in the sky to yet produce the oppressive heat that this day will bring.

On this beautiful morning, the airport is not so busy that a delivery truck carrying pallets of mineral water is not unduly delayed in its scheduled arrival to Terminal A. Flashing a bright yellow badge and getting waved through the checkpoint by a yawning security contractor who barely looks up from his newspaper, the truck parks in the loading dock, emitting the familiar high-pitched beeps as it reverses. A hefty man emerges from the cab, moving quickly to lift the back gate and offload his wares.

The pallets are disbursed amongst the vendors, their single contract with this DHS-approved  supplier making deliveries easy and fast. The bottles are divided and moved to the stores, as they replace older supplies that are dwindling in the heat that has lasted far too long into the fall.

Inside the terminal, the volume of daily travelers slowly increases as the day moves on. Passengers that had brought their own water, having been forced to relinquish their own supplies, pass through security and purchase the newer bottles, knowing that they will likely be met with overworked flight attendants and an undersupply of liquid in the air. They think nothing of purchasing a water bottle from the vendors inside the airport, just as they would think nothing of purchasing a water bottle from a grocery store. 

As the day moves on, these travelers wait in lines to board their planes. They talk, and laugh, and sigh loudly at delays. They yell at flight attendants and they walk listlessly in the terminal. A father of two boards a plane bound for Omaha, destined for a short business trip and a return that night.

A young man waits anxiously to board the plane to visit his father in Denver. An older woman in a severe business suit stares unrelentingly at her smart phone, willing the time to go by faster, for life to pass just a tad quicker. The travelers have places to be, and people to meet. They have purpose.

Unbeknownst to these travelers, to any but a select few, on this day of this month of this year, their water has a purpose as well. The water bottles purchased from this airport board countless planes, bound for countless destinations within the United States and abroad: nearly one flight every sixty-four seconds, to be precise.

The delivery driver whistles tunelessly as he finishes his delivery, and returns to his warehouse, scheduled for more than eighty-seven more deliveries that day, mostly to large grocery stores and big-box consumer outlets.

And in every state of the union, drivers in similar trucks, dressed in similar uniforms, and whistling similar songs, deliver water from the same company to more than one hundred other airports.

In New York City, the sun rises just slightly, and the day starts to heat up.

***

Louis groaned as he typed, willing the digits on the clock to move faster, to please change. But the damnable red digits hung stubbornly and cruelly, smiling in their own way at his pain.

Dear Valued Customer,

I regret to inform you that BankFirst cannot reverse the $75.00 overdraft charge assessed to your account for your debit card purchase dated September 7, in the amount of $0.45 at Gas and Gulp, Trenton. Please refer to your membership agreement for further details.

Thank you for being a member of the BankFirst team. We value your business.

Sincerely yours,

Louis

Online Customer Service Representative 09827

04:21, PST

Louis cringed as he filled the amount, date and location fields in the pre-filled form, shuddering as another part of his soul died a small, undignified death, screaming in the hollows of his conscience.

Get out.

Get out.

Get out.

He clicked in the appropriate fields, proofing the message once so that the quality control pricks in San Francisco wouldn’t send him an annoying email the next morning. He hovered his mouse over the bright green “Send” button momentarily, considering for the thousandth time, deleting the pre-drafted, pre-cleared response, and writing his own.

Dear Customer,

Get a new bank. Seriously. How can you put up with a $75.00 overdraft charge on a $0.45 purchase? What, were you buying a stick of gum? A half bottle of soda? What the fuck can you buy with $0.45 these days? A perforated condom? A four day old hot dog? Get your shit straight and drop this bank like a bad damn habit. Peace out.

Love always and tenderly … to your mom.

Love, Louis

But he didn’t. Because he had rent to pay. And a girlfriend to entertain. And a yappy little dog who vomited in his shoes.

So he kept coming in. He kept reading the same outraged emails, and he kept pushing back the same canned responses.

He glanced up once from his screen, rubbing the back of his neck with a sweaty palm, and sighing loudly, as he frequently did in the bright, soul-sucking glow of his cheap Taiwanese computer screen.

One window. That’s all he’d need to feel human. Just one. Something to wander by during a break. Something to stare at in boredom. Yes, he would be staring out into the night, but the knowledge that outside this building, someone, somewhere was living a life—any life—would have been nice.

But no.

He was here.

Without windows.

Without hope.

Louis worked the night shift at an online customer service hub in Harbor Island, Washington. On duty from eight PM to five AM, he and his shift were responsible for delivering responses to email inquiries from customers across the country. They were one of the few stations that hadn’t been outsourced to India or the Philippines, and they survived on xenophobia alone. Focus groups conducted a year ago by special “efficiency consultants” had revealed the likelihood of a nine percent customer attrition among Southeastern states in the face of expanded fees if they could not speak to a “real American” when they called or wrote to complain. So the bank did the American thing. They kept the jobs in the U.S., even the online jobs, and jacked their fees through the roof. Customer attrition to date was a mere two percent.

Win for the bank.

Loss for Louis, and for his will to live.

He had survival down pat. But living … That wasn’t something he didn’t do. He knew how to bring home just enough money to feed his stupid, vomiting dog and pay for movies and take out Thai food and the too-high insurance for his crappy car. But he wasn’t the guy sky diving or jogging or having fun with friends at the pub. He wasn’t even the guy that finished college, or vocational school. He was the guy who got the crappy job he had because he had applied at the right time, and he clung to it like a miserable sinking life raft, halfway hoping that it would sink beneath him and give him a reason to swim away.

Or sink to the bottom.

He exhaled loudly and rubbed his eyes, glancing around one more time as if willing the building to change. Across the room, someone coughed, emphasizing the absurd size of the building that seemed to somehow mock, just by existing, his total insignificance.

The hub was a massive, dark, windowless building. During the day shift, it employed more than five hundred people, all within one gigantic, cubicle-filled room. The building was a gigantic rectangle the size of three football fields, and if you stood against the east wall, you could stare across the entire expanse and make distant eye contact with anyone standing against the western side. Four and a half foot cubicles obscured all but the heads of the diligent workers, and fluorescent lights bathed the space, day and night. Windows, deemed a security risk and a distraction, were nonexistent. The only inlets of daylight were through the front door, and only when it was open, and the small skylight in the depressing employee lounge upstairs. Due to the secure nature of their accounts, and in what Louis considered a drastic overreaction to an incident of data theft by a former employee, the remainder of the building was locked down and closed out. No external internet, no personal phone lines, and no television. Terminals that networked to the internal systems and the bank’s own websites glowed around him, most flickering the floating screen savers and scrolling marquees so common in large companies.

It was a dreary, drab and utterly depressing place to work, but in an era when Washington’s unemployment rate exceeded twelve percent, it was a place of employment. So Louis came to work, every night.

“Yo, Louie, dude. This guy spent five grand on a strip club in Vegas, and now he’s emailing me from an IP address in Nevada, saying he didn’t do it. That he’s in New York. Nice, right? Something to be said for plausible deniability, right?”

Louis raised his head, shaking his shaggy, oily hair out of his face and pushing his glasses back up his nose. He glared at the young man hanging over the edge of his gray cubicle wall, ear and nose rings glittering in the dull fluorescence of the overhead lights.

Cam leaned back, drumming his hands energetically on the side of the cube walls as he smiled largely, his wide, pimpled face ebullient at discovering a scandal.