Page 4 of In the Nick of Time
TWO
DOUG
In which Agent Swanson meets his match and doesn’t know it.
Per the previous email, the decision remains final. No exception will be made to the requirement that all SPAM agents with roles outside of admin have a partner. As an agent with years of experience, you are in a special position to train a new member of our organization. You are our future.
Nicholas Sedgewick begins Tuesday.
Regards,
April
Final decision, bah. And what was theyou are our future crapabout? Gag.
Pretending he hadn’t read the damn email was better than rage-crushing his desktop, although the second was tempting. But they’d just take the replacement cost out of his paycheck. He didn’t need to learn that lesson again.
Tuesday was fuckingtoday. Doug punched the red Close button with his finger and opened SPAM’s website instead.
“A new partner,” he scoffed quietly, hoping no one sitting close by could hear him talking to himself. “What’s management thinking? What is April thinking? I’mdone. Finished. Counting the days until I get to walk out of this building and never come back.”
The last time he’d put his foot down, they’d assigned the agent to someone else. Why didn’t that work this time?
Long Shot was no more. He was just Doug Swanson, a man who was done with the life of a hero, even a subpar one. He wasn’t getting any younger either, was he? A two-story log cabin situated on a remote lakeside near the Canadian border beckoned to him.
Sure, he’d intended to share it with Rich. The plan—at least for Doug—had been that he and Rich would spend their twilight years sitting on the big front porch, sipping prosecco from those skinny fucking glasses, reading books, and watching fireflies zip around.
Doug had been saddened to learn fireflies didn’t do that well up north. Something about the cold. He’d been even more upset when he’d learned that Rich had decided that he’d rather not live in a cabin with Doug. Or with Doug at all, anywhere. Fucking Rich and his sparkly gigolo. The last thing Doug knew, Rich and Melvin had moved to Palm Springs. Good riddance.
The front page of SPAM’s website was peppered with the usual employee reminders:
Are your loved ones taken care of? Legal services available for less.
Cut-rate legal services offered by SPAM seemed like a Very Bad Idea to Doug. Were their lawyers also subpar? Did SPAM get the Feds’ dropouts?
It’s annual review time, schedule with your supervisor today!
That would be a big fatnofrom Doug.
Are you up to date on the latest OSHA requirements? Download and print your wall poster.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration could kiss Doug’s ass. Maybe that last one was a joke. The team who ran the website had a quirky sense of humor.
“OSHA would crap their fire-retardant pants if they knew what we did,” he muttered.
Doug clicked into theLatest Newstab and began reading. Buried two pages in—where SPAM hid all the important information—was the headline, “Three Agents Missing.”
“Motherfucker,” he murmured, scanning the article to see if he recognized any of the names.
He did.Dammit. Agent Mel Schoenhut. Doug had been one of his trainers, the last one. The one that declared Mel ready to go out into the big, bad world.
The other names mentioned could have been aliases. Mel’s was, after all. It was possible he knew all of them.
Missing was SPAM’s way of saying presumed dead. The same way Southerners usedbless your heartwhen they thought a person was dumber than a dead and rotting stump. Missing SPAM agents usually ended up equalingdeadSPAM agents, but that didn’t mean SPAM felt their legal names needed to be publicized.
After the poison-gas incident at the regional help center in Atlanta, this couldn’t be good. With a sinking feeling, Doug clicked into the article and began to read.
