AM. Now it was just a matter of working around it. His coworkers had spent most of the past week searching for the bug. That was when his boss called him onto the project. Only he was smart enough to fix the issues the rest of them couldn’t understand.
He heard their voices as they filed into the cubicles, laughing and recounting their Saturday night activities. Tim always arrived first to the single-story, red brick building. He slept four hours a night. Only weak-minded people needed more than that, he knew.
“Yo, Tim. Bring the pics?” Johnny Meckle poked his fleshy pink face over the front of Tim’s cubicle. Johnny regularly complained to Tim about his difficulty in meeting the “hot babes,” as he put it. Tim tried to explain that if he washed his hair, lost some weight, and stopped talking about his programming prowess, he might have better luck. Johnny was two years older than Tim, but he followed his younger colleague around like a groupie. He hadn’t changed at all since grade school. The two had been friends when they were kids, until Tim was forced to move away during his sophomore year of high school—after the trial that changed everything.
“Check your email,” Tim replied.
“That’s what I’m talking about! Hey, y’all, come look at this.”
The other six staff members of Information Systems Group gathered around Johnny’s cubicle.
“Ew w w!” drawled Elizabeth, a twenty-six-year-old data clerk who stood a full head taller than Tim and wore oversized glasses that made her look like a giant bug from a sci-fi movie. “What is that? A pig?”
“A wild boar. Tim shot it when we were hunting yesterday.” Johnny’s face, illuminated by the monitor’s blue hue, was giddy with excitement. “Just look at those tusks.” Johnny gesticulated with both hands. “Must be six inches. He could have killed us, if he’d charged. Right, Tim?”
“Sure.” Tim returned to his work, but he had difficulty concentrating with the stares of his coworkers. The hair on the back of his neck stood on edge.
“Tim was in the Special Forces, you know.”
“So we’ve heard.” Elizabeth flipped her dirty blond hair and proceeded to her cubicle.
“Yeah, Afghanistan, Iraq, places like that,” Johnny told the remaining five.
Tim tried to look busy, wishing his officemate would shut up. He was starting to question whether reconnecting with him had been a mistake. Tim had moved back to Birmingham two years ago. Two decades had passed since they’d seen each other, but Johnny was easy to track down. He was living in the same neighborhood they grew up in and saw his parents every Sunday night. The only good part about the reunion was that Johnny had turned Tim on to the New Hope Church. Tim hadn’t missed a single Sunday since moving back to Birmingham. He sat in the front row every week. Now, however, he regretted having told Johnny about his military experience. Most of what he’d done was classified, but he had a few spectacular stories of mayhem from the front lines to share. But Johnny had been a loser when they were kids, and he was an even bigger loser now. Unfortunately, Johnny was the only one who’d hunt with Tim. At least hunting and blowing up homemade pipe bombs in the woods made time with Johnny tolerable.
Tim opened the metal drawer under his desk and removed a tube of Chapstick from the five he kept handy. His lips were cracking again. Even though he’d applied lotion to his face and arms before he left the house, the itching began to crawl across his skin. His fucking eczema.
“Tim can’t talk much about it, though. Top secret stuff and all,” Johnny continued. “He was showing me some of the techniques they used to take down the terrorists. Our hunt was just like a real military op, right, Tim?”
The sides of Tim’s neck flushed. Without looking at the others, he knew they were watching him with skeptical expressions. Judging him.
“Yeah, something like that,” Tim said. He began typing again.
Why did Johnny have to broadcast everything told to him? Tim began to have reservations about including Johnny in the plan he’d been hatching. Johnny was a true believer, but he was dumb. Yet Tim couldn’t accomplish the plan on his own. Tim had been taking precautions, playing down his military experience, for example. He’d even kept a lid on his political and religious ideas around the office—ideas that had gotten him fired from his last job in Little Rock.
Tim had never been at home in the business world. The military should have been his career. And it had been, until a misunderstanding with his sergeant. The accusations. The bullshit. The early discharge handled quietly so that the Army would avoid embarrassment with one of its elite spec ops intelligence operatives. Having to return home to live in the apartment above his mom’s garage had been the ultimate insult. He knew in his bones that God had greater plans for him. Now he was stuck in a glorified warehouse in the dark with these other losers, working in the back office for a medical data processing company. He could do his job in his sleep, but the pay was good, and he needed the money for his plans.
“Hey, Tim, buddy,” a voice from behind him said.
Johnny ducked into his cubicle, while the others hurried to their stations.
Tim swiveled his chair to face Duncan Summers, vice president of ISG, his boss. Duncan towered over Tim, who remained seated. Even if he’d stood, at five foot six and a half, Tim would only have reached Duncan’s goatee. Tim’s relative height disadvantage to his boss didn’t bother him, though. He knew that his muscular build was far superior to the taller man’s. He’d snapped the necks of men taller than Duncan.
“Just reviewed your code on the new financial modeling package. Nice work solving the compatibility problems with our reports. We’ll implement it in November—two months earlier than planned.” The slap on Tim’s shoulder radiated a heat that rose to his face. “Great job, big guy!”
“No problem,” he replied.
Tim swung around to his desk. He removed the cap to a ballpoint pen. While he used one hand to scroll through the window of code on his screen, he used the other to scrape the edge of the cap across his forehead where the tingling was quickly developing into an itch. He worked the pen cap along the permanent crease between his brows. His mother had offered to pay for Botox during his last trip to the dermatologist for his eczema. She’d said he was “too young for such worry lines,” but the last thing he wanted was to look like his frozen-faced slut of a mother. Though she’d never remarried after his father’s death, she’d always brought home plenty of men. Anyway, he thought, his face gave him a serious look, and that’s what he was: a serious man.
“So, how’s the project going?” Duncan was still there, leaning down, his cheery voice now inches from the back of Tim’s head. Tim could feel the humid breath on his neck.
“Fine.”
“Great. Just great. Keep it up, buddy.”
Tim paused the scratching of his forehead. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Elizabeth peeking around the edge of her cubicle, her nose wrinkled in disgust. He opened the metal drawer an inch and dropped the pen cap inside. For some reason, Duncan still hovered over his shoulder. His boss seemed suspicious, checking on him.
Then a delicious thought sprang to his mind. A thought that caused him to lick his chapped lips, tasting the waxy strawberry flavor. A thought that caused him to forget his itchy skin.
Duncan was close enough to stick with the eight-inch commando knife Tim kept in the
