Under Construction

Evan was the IT guy at a small accounting firm. He had been working there for about three years and generally had things under control. The environment was a lot more laid-back than at the oil and gas company where he had been employed right after college, and he was thankful to be somewhere that moved at a slower pace. Most deadlines were flexible, and no one ever yelled at him.

There was a notable change in the general mood, though, when the company was unexpectedly acquired on a cold Wednesday in the fall. "Things will be different now," the CEO explained, "but we're still going to keep doing what we do the way we do it." Everyone was given a notebook with the new parent company's logo on it. They were allowed to go home early to process the news.

The next day when Evan arrived at work at his normal early hour, he was surprised to find the CEO, CFO, and the head of HR already in the office. There was a buzz of excitement. They all waved and smiled as he walked by, but they also lowered their voices until he was out of earshot. As he approached his desk, he noticed that the small conference room near his cubicle had changed. Brown paper had been taped over the glass walls and door from the inside, and s small diamond-shaped sign that read "Under Construction" had been affixed to the outside.

When Evan sat down and logged into his computer, he noticed that he had two new tickets awaiting his attention. Both were requests to set up new temp employees. They each needed a desk with a phone and a computer. They needed network access and email accounts. And they were starting that morning.

Evan did not care for short notice work. He preferred to ease into a day and make gradual progress on the things which fell into the realm of his responsibility. But at least this wasn't normal, he reminded himself. There were probably a lot of things up in the air after the recent acquisition. This was probably something mandated by the parent company. An assertion of dominance. "Let them play their games," he thought. By lunch, both tickets were closed, and the two temps had been successfully onboarded.

The company on the whole was not pretentious, but they took themselves seriously. It was an unwritten rule that everyone would dress on the nicer end of business casual and keep themselves well groomed. "Clients know that we're not uptight, but we are professional and very trustworthy," the CEO had told a colleague during a gala a couple of months before the acquisition.

The new employees, however, did not fit the mold. It wasn't over the top, but everyone noticed it. They were both youngish males who looked a bit like they cut their own hair. Their polo shirts were just a little too big and a little too generic. Their pants were never quite the right length. They looked like high school students who had been given a Target giftcard and told to assemble their best impression of what their parents might have worn to work in the late 90's.

The acquisition created enough work that no one had much time to think about the new temps, though. The new parent company was funneling clients to them, and all the employees (including Evan) were putting in lots of overtime to try and keep up. Unlike everyone else, the temps didn't seem stressed and always left on time. No one complained because no one really knew what they did. So it really wasn't surprising when one of them stopped showing up after a couple of weeks. Everyone was too busy to notice.

Evan was annoyed when he saw the ticket to remove access for the temp who had vanished. He already had too much to do, but he knew that his bonus was based on how quickly he resolved the tickets he received. "Just because he doesn't seem to make a priority of coming to work doesn't mean I should have to put in even more overtime," he thought. The temp was removed from the system and all of his files were archived in case HR needed them in the future. The company moved on as if he'd never been there.

In the following months, the company experienced a period of rapid expansion. The new parent company had launched a multimillion dollar marketing campaign that had successfully captured many new clients, and the small accounting company (now a wholly owned subsidiary) was struggling to keep up. They were hiring aggressively, and Evan completely and totally lost track of time. He fell into a routine: Come in early, work late, sleep too little, repeat. New full time and temp employees were coming in on a weekly basis, and it seemed like the temps were leaving at an unreasonable rate.

He commented about it to the head of HR when he saw her in the break room one afternoon, and she froze for just a moment before recovering and answering with a very corporate approved message. "The thing to remember, Evan," she said in a comforting tone, "Is that the average person in the temp market is looking for a very low pressure job where they can do the bare minimum and get by. Our environment just isn't conducive to that attitude." That seemed like a generalization, but Evan was also working on several larger scale projects regarding network integration with the new parent company, and there was very little time to think of much else.

One night in the spring, Evan was leaving especially late. It had been a crazy day full of meetings, and he felt the need to stay late to actually get some things accomplished. As he walked out of the office, he felt strange. He knew he was the only one left in the office, but he couldn't shake the feeling of being watched. He stopped and looked around before he closed the door to the office behind him, but there was nothing out of the ordinary. As he was closing the door to his car, he thought he heard a scream, but he must have been mistaken. Had he turned around and looked up, he would have seen a flicker of light in the window of conference room closest to his desk.

After the new year, things began to slow down a little. The company was still growing, but at a manageable rate. Hiring full time employees had stopped almost entirely, but the temps were still coming and going. The desk next to Evan had always been empty, but one morning in mid-January, he noticed that he had a ticket requesting that the spare desk be set up for another temp. "Just what I need," thought Evan, "Some slacker in here babbling to me about nonsense when I'm trying to get work done." He set up the desk and braced for the worst.

As it turned out, though, this temp was different than the rest. He was older, put together, and seemed to be very focused and driven. He was quiet and worked quickly and efficiently on anything thrown his way. Slowly, he and Evan began to exchange pleasantries. They actually had a lot in common. The new temp, whose name was John, had formerly been the IT guy at another small company in town that had gone bankrupt the year before. He was taking temp work until he found something more long term. They liked a lot of the same movies. They cheered for the same baseball team.

Over time, Evan came to enjoy his new desk neighbor. He saw John as an ally and looked forward to talking to him while they both ate lunch at their desks. It had been a while since he’d made a new friend, and it was enjoyable to have someone to socialize with at work. John was also a great help. Together they were knocking out tickets left and right. In passing, Evan thought that if this kept up, he’d have to buy John dinner with some of his bonus money at the end of the year. Things were going great.

“What’s the deal with that conference room?” John asked one morning.

“The one that’s under construction?” Evan responded.

“Yeah. Kind of weird that we’re not involved… Like, if it were going to be used for video conferencing or something, I’d think we’d be running cables or setting up new switches or something.”

“That’s actually a really good point…”

“How long has it been like that?”

“Since October, I think.”

“Weird,” said John.

Evan was shocked when one day he came in and John was gone. No goodbye. No two weeks notice. All of his personal effects had been removed from the desk, and his key card was left on top of his keyboard. Evan tried to shake it off, but he felt strange about it all day. “This doesn’t make sense,” he thought. “He was doing so well here… and I would at least have expected a goodbye.”

The day that John vanished ended up being a very long day for Evan. The new parent company was headquartered on the west coast, and there were intermittent networking issues between the two offices. Evan had to stay extra late while working with local IT from the other site, and he was not happy about it. “Of course they don’t mind working right now. It’s only 5pm their time, but it’s my evening that I’m missing.”

By the time he left, the office was empty, and it was dark outside. This was becoming a regular occurrence. As he approached his car, he thought of John and wondered yet again why he hadn’t said goodbye. For some reason, he fumbled his keys and dropped them. He had to get down on his hands and knees to pick them up from under the vehicle. As he stood back up, he heard a muffled scream in the empty night air. He turned around and looked in the direction of the noise. He noticed a flicker of light in the conference room window.

Evan was on high alert as he walked back toward the office. Something wasn’t right, and he could feel it. His hands shook as he fished his employee access card out of his pocket and waved it in front of the small scanner next to the door. The light flashed from red to green. Once inside, he had to wait for the elevator and started to second guess himself.

“Maybe I should just call the police. But what would I tell them? That light could have been any number of things. Maybe they actually are doing construction in that room, but only at night. Maybe that scream was just a saw cutting metal or something. But then why didn’t I see anyone go in before I left? Maybe they took one elevator up while I took the other down. But what if they didn’t? What if the office is on fire? What if someone is robbing the place? What would they do if I interrupted them?”

The ding that signaled the elevator’s arrival broke his stream of thought, and he gathered his courage and stepped inside. “I can at least gather enough information to make an informed call to the police if needed,” he rationalized. The elevator ride felt like it lasted for days. When the doors opened again on his floor, the office had taken on a dark and menacing look. It was lit only by the glow of a few exit signs and the power indicators of various electronic devices. He chose not to turn the lights back on, just in case.

There was a faint sweet, smoky scent in the air that he couldn’t identify. Walking slowly and quietly toward his desk, Evan wondered if he was crazy. He felt like he was either massively over or under reacting to the situation but had no idea which was the case. He wished John was there with him. This would have been such a different experience if he weren’t alone.

As he approached his workspace, Evan could see that something was very out of the ordinary. The door of the “Under Construction” room was ajar for the first time in months, and soft light was flickering inside. He could hear a low chanting coming from the room, but he could also hear the muffled cries of someone obviously in pain. He had no idea how to process what was happening. His brain went on autopilot and kept him walking toward the door. A hazy smoke of some kind seemed to be drifting out from the room. He crept up to the thin opening and peered inside. What he saw blew his mind.

Lit candles on stands around the edges of the room cast a soft, flickering orange light over everything. There were also two brass pots full of flames on the floor that seemed to be the source of the smoky haze. It was dim, but he could make out that three figures were there wearing black robes with hoods pulled up over their heads. They were standing in a triangle in the center of the room chanting something unintelligible in unison in a quiet monotone. Between them was something horrible. A body was strapped down to what looked like a stone table with the feet elevated slightly higher than the head.

Evan was so confused he couldn’t move. Just as he was starting to fully absorb what was happening, the chanting suddenly intensified. One of the hooded figures pulled a long, black knife from somewhere and cut the body on the table. The body flinched and tried to sit up, and Evan caught the briefest glimpse of the profile of the face. The man looked so terrified that it took Evan several seconds to realize it was John.

Before he even finished thinking about what was happening, Evan burst into the room. The hooded figures turned and looked at him, and he stopped mid-step. He had no plan, and the sudden realization of the danger of the situation paralyzed him. His brain fumbled for words, but couldn’t come up with anything.

“Evan?” said one of the hooded figures.

The three looked at each other and then removed their hoods. They were the CEO, CFO, and the head of HR.

“Evan, what are you doing here?” asked the CFO in a confused but friendly tone.

He tried to talk, but nothing intelligible came out. “I saw a light. The sound. Dropped my keys… Thought there was a fire, or… Robbery? I didn’t know what to… What’s happening here?” He was wildly uncomfortable.

“Progress,” said the head of HR. “There are amazing things at play here. The company that acquired us taught us the things we needed to grow.”

“But, but… What… How…” Evan babbled.

“Companies have always profited from the blood of their workers,” said the CEO, “but the parent company showed us the ancient rituals to expedite the process. There are forces at work here that you cannot imagine. For every pint of blood we sacrifice, our company will expand in a way previously unimaginable. The life of a temp is a small price to pay. There are no limits. We are the future, Evan. Join us.”

Evan was still confused. He kept expecting to wake up and realize he’d been having a nightmare. This couldn’t be as real as it felt. He wanted to go back outside and call the police like he should have in the first place. He needed to get away from all of this. Something in the air was keeping him from thinking clearly. It felt thick, and his mouth wasn’t working quite right when he tried to talk. He took a step back. He was going to go outside and call the police and have them come back to get John. John! The thought jolted him back to clarity. He had to save John! He rushed forward. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he had to do something.

As noble as Evan’s intentions were, the fight was ultimately one against three, and the three had knives. The struggle didn’t last long, and in the coming months, the company doubled its rate of growth.