16.
 Mick awoke—or was it, became conscious again?—sitting in a pleasant room that smelled of fresh coffee. A thickly carpeted office in a high rise tower, it seemed to Mick. Picture windows overlooked an endless nightmare vista of lights and industrial shapes in the night. Dirty gray clouds rolled over, and every few seconds there was a flash of lightning, a tremor of thunder.
An attractive blonde in a business suit poured coffee from a stainless steel pot. "How are you doing, Mick?"
He had to lick his lips, which seemed stuck together. "Okay, I think. Am I still alive?"
"Yes, you lucky stiff. No pun intended." She smiled. "Decaf?"
Mick nodded.
"Do you remember how you got here?"
He nodded. "I think so." He tried to think, and he couldn't quite remember. "Should I be panicking? I can't remember."
"No, Mick. That's the way it's supposed to be."
"This is hell, isn't it? I wasn't supposed to go here, which is a relief. You got fire here someplace, don't you?"
She made a wry face. "We're a little more sophisticated." Her gaze roved across the tortured cityscape. "You don't want to know."
"Seems an efficient operation, except that I'm here."
"Yes. We do the grab, get a jump on the processing." She sat down in a chair opposite. She folded her wrists over pretty knees that poked out from under mauve wool. Her fingernails were long and wrought in elaborate designs of gold and enamel. She saw him staring, and covered her knees, as any woman would, then realized what he was looking at. She held up a hand and laughed. "Oh, the nails. Yes, it gets boring here, not much to do. We're the Returns Section, and we don't get too many customers."
"Returns, huh? I get to go back?"
She nodded.
"I don't want to know anything about the rest of my life, please!"
She nodded again. "We are very careful. We do an E-Z Wipe. Quick and painless. You'll never remember any of this, not even in a deep dream."
He took another look at the cityscape. "Wow, look at that." Big billboards faded and reemerged in the ocean waves of fog. He could make out some of the words: JUDGMENT. MURDER. HEAVEN. TOURS FREE. GO BY MINIBUS. THREE-DAY PACKAGE. ETERNAL OPTIONS. It all looked very industrial, very commercial.
"How do you get a job here?" I asked.
She was quiet. She rubbed her hands together and looked at them and began to cry.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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