Company - Max Barry [89]
“I can't resist you,” Elizabeth says.
“It's a sad state of—” Roger stops. “What?”
“I think about you all the time. I don't mean to. I can't help it. It's making me crazy. I . . . I . . .” Her voice tightens, then she spits it out. “I want you.”
Holly claps a hand over her mouth. Freddy's mouth sags open. Jones's eyes expand until they take up his entire face.
“I see.” Roger's voice is a growl. “You're being funny.”
“I'm desperate,” Elizabeth whispers, “for . . . you.”
Roger's lips tighten until they are almost invisible. His jaw muscles work. Jones, Freddy, and Holly simultaneously push back in their office chairs, moving themselves out of the firing line. Then Roger turns on his heel and strides out. His three surprised lackeys are left to maneuver the trolley around and wheel it after him. The Training Sales team listen to its slow, squeaky progress.
Freddy says, “Oh. My. God.”
Holly says, “Elizabeth, you kick so much ass.”
Elizabeth's face is drained of color. “I need to sit down.” Holly leaps up. Elizabeth takes her hand until she can grip the chair's plastic armrests. She looks from one awestruck sales assistant face to another. “That . . . I was just joking, you know.”
“Oh God, of course,” Holly says. “That's why it was so funny.”
“Right.” She is starting to shake. “Exactly.”
Roger slams his office door hard enough to make the glass wall shudder and the vertical blinds bang. He stalks to his desk and snatches up the phone. He gets as far as dialing the first three digits of Human Resources . . . then hesitates. If he completes this call, Elizabeth will be off the premises within ten minutes. But that will be the end of it: she will then be beyond his power. The story of this humiliation, however, will live on in corporate memory. It will be the punch line to Roger's entire career.
With a strangled growl, he slams the handset back down. He throws himself into his leather chair and puts his head in his hands.
A large yellow envelope of the sort used for internal mail sits on his desk in front of him; it must have been delivered while he was out. One end bulges oddly. Roger sits up, unseals the envelope, and tips its contents onto his desk. A plastic cup sealed with a yellow lid tries to roll away; he grabs it. It is empty. A sticker on the front says NAME and EMPLOYEE ID #, and has spaces for writing in both.
He checks the envelope and finds a memo stuck to the inside. It's from Human Resources and Asset Protection, to all department heads. In the interests of company productivity, it says, Zephyr Holdings has introduced a drug-testing policy. Every week, one employee will be randomly selected from each department to provide a urine sample. Employees who fail the test, or refuse to comply with it, will be terminated. This is covered by Section 38.2 of the standard employee work contract, a clause Roger recalls having queried when he first joined Zephyr. If he remembers right, Human Resources told him not to worry about it because the clause was just a standard industry thing and Zephyr didn't actually do drug tests.
The memo contains a list of all the employees randomly selected for the first round of testing, and advises departmental managers to keep this relatively quiet. There is no need to make this into a big deal, the memo says. Employees should not be made to feel they are being singled out.
Roger has an encyclopedic knowledge of Zephyr employees. So he notices that every one of the randomly selected employees is female and in her twenties or thirties. He notices that the employee selected from Staff Services is Elizabeth.
The other day Eve and Jones were in the underground parking lot and she was fiddling with his tie and giggling while he made jokes about Tom Mandrake's taste in shirts when Blake's Porsche cruised by. The windows were tinted too darkly for Jones to tell whether he and Eve had been spotted, but ever since Blake has seemed even more disgusted with him than he was previously. He has tried to be more discreet,