Mandala Volume 1 Hardworlder | Book 1 The Office Job - Chapter 2: The Diner
Two killers walk into a greasy spoon. One says to the other-
What started as a sheet metal taco stand next to an auto shop was now a fully built restaurant, its wide windows covered in fluorescent advertisements for specials that never went away, and a small drive-through window punched into the side. Truckers and office workers sat side by side under humming fluorescent lights, pressed against walls covered in framed newspapers and fake memorabilia. Cheap cooking oil smoked on hash browns, and scents of coffee and bacon floated by in little pockets.
A blonde woman in a navy trench coat sat near the front window, arms folded, legs crossed, coiled like a snake. Her coffee steamed untouched on the table and she watched the door with prepared disappointment.
A black SUV pulled up to the fractured cement ramp out front. A broad man in a Burberry trench over an Adidas tracksuit got out of the center door and smiled like the world had rolled into his trap. He made it halfway to the entrance and remembered the cigarette dangling from his mouth. He took one last kiss-you-goodbye drag and flicked it away. The smoke clung to his head as he stepped through the door.
“Good morning sir. Table or booth?” the hostess called to him. He pointed and walked towards the blonde woman, who watched him with a look like disgust but less passionate.
“Morning,” he said in a low tone that told everyone around to stop listening. His SUV parked in a spot just outside the window and a tall thin man in a charcoal suit stepped out of the driver’s door and lit a cigarette. The blonde woman felt that if a bomb went off, he would just shrug and take another drag. She sighed and looked back across the table.
“Good morning. I’m Theresa,” said Lindsey, green eyes sharpened under thick brown eyebrows. She had a soft round face, held in a controlled pose of contempt, with a chin strong enough to make it work. The man took off his sunglasses and blinked his flashing brown eyes at her.
“Nice to meet you, Theresa. I’m Malachi,” said Philip, smiling.
Lindsey squeezed her coffee cup in a way that let him and anyone else still watching know she wanted to throw it at him.
“What’s on your mind?”
“Wait...”
He held up his hand and spun around as the waitress walked up behind him.
“Four scrambled eggs, four pieces of white buttered toast, four big ass pieces of bacon, and a pot, like the whole damn pitcher, of coffee. Thanks.”
He turned around and the waitress scratched on a notepad.
“Write while you walk, babe.” She grimaced and marched off. He smiled and reached over the table for Lindsey’s cup.
“You never drink your coffee.”
“I don’t see the point,” she said. He laughed and his bulging cheekbones jumped on his face.
“No fun at all. Here.”
He handed her a phone. She turned it on with her thumbprint and pulled up a file labeled Paul. It gave his home address, employer, favorite bars and clubs, work schedule, and friends (the smallest portion). There was also a black and white photo and some handwritten notes in the margins.
“What’s all this shit on the sides?”
“That’s my notes.” He leaned back in his seat proudly and stretched. His wide chest tested the zipper on the tracksuit.
“I can’t read it. Is she sure about his job? It doesn’t seem like he would go for it.” According to the file, he worked at a large insurance company as a shift supervisor. Usually, they were venture capitalists or something.
“They made sure,” said Philip. He grunted at the end of his stretch and brought his hands together on the table.
“They?”
“Yea, Mom and, uh, Rochelle. Went in together while he was out.” He finished the coffee and set the cup down at the edge of the table.
“So, he’s not up?”
“No.” He looked back towards the kitchen. A few people who had been staring at them looked away hurriedly and he smiled at the side of their heads.
“Then he’s being watched,” Lindsey said. Philip, seeing no sign of his food, leaned forward over the table.
“Probably. That’s what my notes said.” He pointed at the phone.
“Any clue who’s covering him?”
“No idea. I don’t think they’re anyone big time, though.” Lindsey was about to tell him what his assumptions were worth to her when the waitress came up from the kitchen. She set down the plate of eggs, bacon and toast, the pot of coffee, and a smaller plate with three pancakes.
“Pancakes?”
“They come with all breakfast combos,” the waitress said icily.
“Does it count as a combo? Thought it was, like, à la carte.” She was already gone, so he looked at Lindsey instead. “I guess since I ordered so much?”
“Was there something else or can I leave you to your food?” She had tried to get him to just leave the goddamned phone somewhere else, but he had said he was ‘already on the road’. She had been trained not to meet up unless absolutely necessary. The boss had told her Philip was old school, but every job so far had her doubting it.
He pulled his jacket off and let it hang on the back of the seat. A few of the truckers who had been watching from a booth started talking quietly about the obvious shape of body armor under his tracksuit. He unrolled the silverware from the napkin and cleared his throat.
“Have you seen Monkey? She hasn’t touched base yet.”
Lindsey let the silence grow before she spoke, low and sharp.
“Who?”
Philip realized his blunder. “God dammit, Beth, or whatever. Our driver?”
Lindsey stayed quiet.
“Fine, well, if you hear anything, just let me know.”
“Is that all?”
“Yea. No! You know where the new guy is on this?” he pointed with his knife and dripped syrup on the table.
She just glared at him, so he sighed and started forking his food.
“All right, whatever. It’d be nice to know. Like there’s microphones in the silverware or some shit.”
Outside the diner, Lindsey stopped next to the man in the charcoal suit and pretended to check her phone.
“The less words that come out of his mouth, the better.” She said just loud enough for him to hear. He smiled and flicked a butt on the ground.
“You haven’t seen him work,” he said to the wind. She glanced up at the sky and walked off across the parking lot. Last night's rain had broken into thin fragments of clouds, and a bright ring of silver morning reached over the banks and fast-food places like an explosion frozen in the air. It was one of those electric days where every sound carried for miles. What a day to die.
It was a long way down. Fifty stories of empty air between him and a vaulted semicylindrical skylight. Tempered window glass glittered on the roof, the stairs, the street, reflecting the red-blue lightbars like fae fire for the modern age.
Up here, golden twilight bled across the sky from an hour dead sun. Down there, downtown gathered shadow in the streets and alleys and on the eastern faces of the buildings. Somewhere a helicopter growled. Newscast. They had already lost one police chopper. A smoking husk setting fire to a grass slope between the curved ramps of the mixmaster, its jet fuel burning on six lanes.
Snipers watched him. Swat moved into the lobby below, ant-like. National guard not far behind. Unknowable tier-one operators waiting in the wings after that. His death inescapable. But something else, something more pressing, had chased him up here.
“You’ve made your own little world and you think you’re safe in it. There’s no place they can’t get to anymore. That time is over. You can either go down pretending it isn’t, or you can bring some piece of that old world with you into the new. God knows we’re going to need it.”
But he had never felt safe. Never felt powerful. Never felt like he was untouchable. He didn’t need to. He had had something better. He had never felt alone.
Until now.
Behind him, the door flew off the hinges and bounced along the carpet. He was already falling when the gun fired, a CQBR M4. He could tell by the sound, but he would have known without hearing it, the same way he knew without looking who fired it.
The round that made it under his back plate was the most painful wound of his existence. It twisted like a knife and stung like hate, burned like betrayal.
Other guns joined in, but they missed or jammed. Useless. He was already dead, a falling corpse too forsaken to stop breathing.
Air rushed over his ears, drowning out everything like the world was screaming. A spotlight flashed up and passed over him, blinding him for a brief moment, a sun-bright star turning everything else to darkness, reminding him of another world. When the city returned, he saw a jagged gap in the vaulted frame rising towards him and the body crumpled in the lobby below. Another fallen Angel.
He pulled the chute and the harness squeezed the wound. The city around him burned and the sound of rushing blood drowned out the wind in his ears. Then the old familiar feeling of flight took his spirit with it, and the pain faded to nothing. He cut right at four hundred feet up, aiming at the black mirror side of a swordblade shaped tower. A lucky spotlight caught him. Doomed him.
He barely heard the gunfire, but the tracers glowed like meteors and cracked like a body on the pavement. They zipped past his head, tore through his canopy, dug into his shoulder, and sliced paracord to nothing. The spotlight held him until he spun and dropped uncontrollably. Defeated by light. Falling into darkness. What kind of Angel?
Black glass rushed by him as he struggled for control and flew over a thin grey sliver of building so close he almost lost his legs to the AC units. As he came out from the side of the black tower, another current sent him spinning again, but not before he saw it.
Alone on a triangle plot of grass, cement pathways, and fountain ponds. Unnatural in an urban biome of glass and steel. Squat corkscrew tower of white stone, made in imitation and celebration of things a thousand years dead. He laughed. It seemed to pull him in, spiral roof coming up to meet him, to catch him, to save him. Another god damned spotlight swept him as he tried to position himself for some kind of landing. He found the flashlight button and trigger on his slung FN F2000 and fired half a mag between his feet. The disc of plastic set in the top of the spiral shattered and wildflower colored stained glass burst beneath it, flowing down his beam into the dark chapel. He fell through the ring without a scrape, as if guided.
The sudden stop pulled the harness so tight on his wound that for a moment the world went black and he floated in a swarm of glowing rainbow fragments while spirits waited out in the dark.
He returned to reality hanging forty feet up in the air, blood running down his leg, flashlights sweeping in through the doorway below, catching bits of colored glass and shell casings on the floor. He got the harness undone with sluggish movements while the beams below grew brighter and boots striking concrete echoed in the conical hall.
Just before he got the last strap off, a spotlight flashed above him, sending a solid column of white past his head and setting the colored circles on fire. The rotary blades roared over his heartbeat and a voice boomed out of a loudspeaker, wordless, barking.
The strap gave. He dropped and his legs pulled in automatically for a para fall. For a moment, he thought he would fall forever. The floor and walls were one plane of darkness beneath a blazing white oval and a scattering of prismatic shapes.
His knees came up with a jolt and his feet crashed through a chair. He rolled hard on the carpet and slammed into a cube-shaped stone altar.
A moment of stillness. Light playing on the walls. The helicopter morphed into a thunderstorm. They broke in with weapons raised, screaming.
“Hands! Lemme see your fucking hands! Hands! Drop the rifle!”
It’s on a sling, dipshit. But all that came out was a wheeze. They kept on screaming anyway. As if they didn’t want to shoot him. As if they didn’t know the guys on that first chopper.
A voice came in, clear as polished silver, floating over the screaming like real speech over TV dialogue.
“It won’t end with this.”
That’s what you think. But again, just a wheeze. He grabbed the F2000 with one hand and they shot him thirty times. He watched glowing gunsmoke rise to the disk of light above and disappear.
