The Warehouse Page 3

  A countdown clock appeared on the screens in the headrests.

  3:00

  2:59

  2:58

  They both reached for the middle seat, where they’d pushed the pamphlets and earbuds. Their hands brushed and the plastic wrap crinkled. The goof seemed to be looking at her, so she was careful not to return the eye contact, just in case, though she could feel the warmth of where he had touched her skin.

  Close, but not too close.

  Get in, do the job, get the hell out.

  “Can’t wait for this video to be over,” she said. “I’d love to take a nap.”

  “That’s not a bad idea.”

  As she plugged the buds into the port under the screen, she wondered again about who had hired her.

  The initial call and all communication had come in anonymously and encrypted. The offer had blown her hair back. She could retire on it. She would have to, probably, after handing over her genetic material. As much as it pained her to let someone pluck her hair and log her in a database, after this it wouldn’t even really matter. She could spend the rest of her life on some beach in Mexico. A big, beautiful beach with no extradition laws.

  This wasn’t her first anonymous job, but it was definitely her biggest. And it wasn’t her job to know, but she couldn’t help but wonder.

  The way to answer the question of “who” meant expanding on it slightly: who benefits? That didn’t narrow it down. When the king is dying the entire kingdom is suspect.

  “I’m so sorry,” the goof said, breaking her train of thought. “I should have introduced myself.” He offered his hand across the empty seat. “Paxton.”

  She considered the hand for a moment, before reaching over with her own. His grip was stronger than she would have guessed, his hand mercifully free of sweat.

  She reminded herself of her name for this gig.

  “Zinnia,” she said.

  “Zinnia,” he repeated, nodding. “Like the flower.”

  “Like the flower,” she agreed.

  “Nice to meet you.”

  It was the first she’d said it out loud to anyone other than herself. She liked the way it sounded. Zinnia. It sounded like a smooth rock pinging off the surface of a still pond. It was her favorite part of each new job. Picking a name.

  Zinnia smiled and turned from Paxton, slid the buds in her ears as the timer hit zero, and the video began.

  WELCOME

  A well-appointed suburban kitchen. Stainless-steel surfaces sparkling in sunlight through big bay windows. Three children, two girls and a boy, run across the screen laughing, playfully chased by a mother, a young brunette, barefoot, wearing a white sweater and jeans.

  The mother stops and turns to the screen, putting her hands on her hips, speaking directly to the audience.

  Mother: “I love my children, but they can be a lot to handle. Just getting them dressed and out the door can take forever. And after the Black Friday Massacres…”

  She pauses, presses her hand to her chest, closes her eyes, and looks on the verge of tears, before opening them again, and smiling.

  “…after that, the thought of going outside to shop just scares me to death. Honestly, if it wasn’t for Cloud, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  She smiles, soft and sure, the way a mother is supposed to smile.

  Cut to the little boy on the floor, face twisted in pain, holding on to his knee, scraped red and raw. The child wails.

  Child: “Mommeeeeeeeee.”

  Cut to a man in a red polo shirt, leaping to the ground from someplace above. He’s lean, handsome, blond. He looks grown in a lab. The camera zooms in on the item in his hand: a box of adhesive bandages.

  He takes off, sprinting between two massive aisles in a cavernous warehouse, the shelves stacked neatly with a diverse array of items.

  Mugs and toilet paper and books and soup. Soap and bathrobes and laptops and motor oil. Envelopes and playsets and towels and sneakers.

  The man stops in front of a long line of conveyor belts, puts the box of bandages in a blue bin, and pushes it down the belt.

  Cut to a drone buzzing across a brilliant blue sky.

  Cut to the mother, tearing open the cardboard container emblazoned with the Cloud logo. She takes out the box of bandages and removes one, which she applies to the child’s knee. The boy smiles and kisses his mother on the cheek.

  The mother turns back to the screen.

  Mother: “Thanks to Cloud, I’m always ready for whatever life throws at us. And when it comes time for a treat, Cloud has me covered there, too.”

  The man in the red polo is back, this time a box of chocolates tucked under his arm. He takes off running again. The camera doesn’t follow him. He grows smaller and smaller between the cavernous aisles, until he hangs a hard right and disappears, and it’s just the monolithic shelves overlooking an empty floor, stretching into the distance.

  Cut to a white screen. A lean, older man walks out. He’s wearing jeans, a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and brown cowboy boots. Silver hair cut high and tight. He stops in the center of the screen and smiles.

  Gibson: “Hi. I’m Gibson Wells, your new boss. It’s a real pleasure to welcome you to the family.”

  Cut to Wells roaming the massive aisles, this time with men and women in red whipping around him. No one stops to acknowledge him, as if he’s a ghost on their periphery.

  Gibson: “Cloud is the solution to every need. It’s a point of relief in a fast-paced world. We aim to assist people and families who can’t make it out to a store, or don’t have one nearby, or don’t want to take the risk.”

  Cut to a room gridded by massive tables, covered with blue tubing, like industrial air pumps, except when the workers in the red polos spray the items on the table, they’re encased in swelling foam that quickly dries into cardboard.

  They affix labels and a sticker of the Cloud logo to the packages, and put them onto a series of pulleys moving endlessly toward the ceiling.

  Wells is still roaming, the workers running with speed and precision, oblivious to him.

  Gibson: “Here at Cloud, we believe in offering a safe, secure work environment where you can be the master of your own destiny. We have a wide array of positions available, from the pickers—those handsome folks in red—to our boxers, to our support staff…”

  Cut to a giant room full of cubicles, everyone wearing canary-yellow polo shirts and phone headsets, looking at small tablets bolted onto desks. Everyone is smiling and laughing, catching up with old friends.

  Gibson: “…to the assistants…”

  Cut to a gleaming industrial kitchen where employees in green polo shirts prepare meals and empty trash cans. Still smiling and laughing. Wells is wearing a hairnet, chopping an onion next to a small Indian woman.

  Gibson: “…to the tech team…”

  Cut to a group of young men and women in brown polos examining the exposed guts of a computer terminal.

  Gibson: “…to the managers…”

  Cut to a table at which a group of men and women in bright white polo shirts hold tablets and discuss something very important. Wells stands off to the side.

  Gibson: “At Cloud, we evaluate your skill set, and we place you in the position that’s best suited for both of us.”

  Cut to a tidy, catalog-pretty apartment, where a young man lifts his daughter onto his shoulders while he stirs a pot of sauce on the stove.

  The walls feature cursive decals that say LOVE and INSPIRE. The couch is sleek and modern. The galley kitchen is big enough to fit four people cooking together and looks onto a sunken living room suited for a cocktail party.

  Wells is gone now, but his voice remains.
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  Gibson: “Because Cloud isn’t just a place to work. It’s a place to live. Trust me, when your friends and family come to visit, they just might want to work here, too.”

  Cut to a clogged superhighway, the cars not moving, fumes turning the sky to ash.

  Gibson: “The average American’s commute used to be two hours, round-trip. That’s two hours of time wasted. Two hours’ worth of carbon pumped into the atmosphere. Every employee who chooses to live in our residential facilities can make it from their spot on the floor to home in less than fifteen minutes. When more of your time belongs to you, that’s more time for you to be with your family, or pursue a hobby, or just get some much-needed relaxation.”

  Cut to a montage of quick scenes: Shoppers roaming a white marble corridor surrounded by brand-name stores. A doctor pressing a stethoscope to a young man’s chest under his shirt. A young couple munching popcorn, movie screen light flickering across their faces. An older woman running on a treadmill.

  Gibson: “We offer everything from entertainment, to health and wellness services, to education that meets the highest standards. When you’re here, you’ll never want to leave. And I want this to feel like home. A real home. That’s why, while we always make your safety a top priority, you won’t see cameras everywhere you look. That’s no way to live.”

  Cut to white. Wells is back. The background has dropped away, so he’s standing in a void.

  Gibson: “Everything you see here, and more, will be available to you when you’ve started at Cloud. And you can trust that your job will be secure. While some of our processes are automated, I don’t believe in employing robots. A robot will never replicate the dexterity and critical reasoning skills of a human being. And on the day that they can—we won’t care. We believe in family. That’s the key to running a successful business.”

  Cut to a shuttered storefront, the windows boarded with plywood. Wells walks onto the sidewalk, looks up at the store, shakes his head, and turns to the camera.

  Gibson: “Things are tough. No doubt about that. But we’ve faced adversity before, and we’ve come out on top, because that’s what we do. We achieve and we persevere. It’s my dream to help get America back on its feet, and that’s why I’ve been working with your local elected officials to ensure we have the room and ability to grow, so we can get more Americans earning a living wage. Our success starts with you. You are the gears that keep our economy moving. I want you to know that sometimes your job might be hard, or feel repetitive, but you should never forget how important you are. Without you, Cloud is nothing. If you really think about it…”

  The camera closes in. He smiles and extends his arms, as if welcoming the viewer in for a hug.

  Gibson: “…I work for you.”

  Cut to a table in a restaurant. Seated around it are a dozen men and women, many of them overweight. The men clutch cigars, the air hazy with curls of gray smoke. The table is littered with empty wineglasses and plates of half-eaten steak.

  Gibson: “Some people will tell you it’s their job to fight for you. It’s not. Their job is to fight for themselves. Their job is to enrich themselves off of your hard work. At Cloud, we’re here for you, and we mean that.”

  The camera backs out, showing Gibson standing in a small apartment.

  Gibson: “Now, you might be wondering, what happens next? When you arrive at Cloud you’ll be issued a room and a CloudBand.”

  Gibson holds up his wrist to show a small glass square with a rugged leather strap.

  Gibson: “Your CloudBand will be your new best friend. It’ll help you get around the facility, open doors, pay for items, provide directions, monitor your health and heart rate, and most important, assist you in your job. And when you arrive at your room, you’re going to find some more goodies….”

  He holds up a small box.

  Gibson: “The color of your shirt will tell you where you’re working. We’re still processing your test information, but by the time you get to your room, we’ll have it figured out. Once you arrive, drop your stuff, take a walk around. Get yourself acquainted. Tomorrow is orientation, where you’ll be teamed up with someone in your section to show you the ropes.”

  He puts down the box and winks at the camera.

  Gibson: “Good luck, and welcome to the family. We have more than a hundred MotherCloud facilities throughout the United States, and I’m known to visit from time to time. So if you see me wandering the floor, feel free to stop me and say hello. I’m looking forward to meeting you. And remember: call me Gib.”

  GIBSON

  So now that we got all the depressing stuff out of the way, probably the best way to start is to tell you how I got into this business in the first place, right?

  There’s a problem with that: I don’t right know. There is not a kid on this planet who grows up thinking he wants to run the biggest electronic retail and cloud computing company in the world. When I was a kid I wanted to be an astronaut.

  Remember the Curiosity rover? The one sent out to poke around Mars, way back in 2011? I loved that thing. I had a model of it, big enough I could put the family cat on top and drive him around the living room. All this time later I can remember stuff about Mars, like how it’s got the tallest mountain in the solar system—Olympus Mons—and an object that weighs one hundred pounds on Earth would weigh only thirty-eight pounds up there.

  Hell of a weight-loss plan, if you ask me. Easier than giving up red meat.

  So I was convinced I’d be the first person to step foot on that planet. Spent years studying. It wasn’t really that I wanted to go. I wanted to be first. But by the time I got to high school, someone else did it, so that dream went out the window.

  Not that I still wouldn’t like to go if someone offered, but the mystique of it was sort of gone. There’s a big difference between being the first person to do a thing and being the second.

  Anyway, the whole time I was pretending to bounce around an alien planet, I was already on track to be where I am today. Because the thing I always really liked to do was take care of people.

  In the town where I grew up, there was this general store, about a mile away from our house. Coop’s. Saying used to be that if Mr. Cooper didn’t have it, you probably didn’t need it.

  The place was a marvel. Not big the way you expect a store to be. Just big enough, everything stacked to the ceiling, like everything was balancing on itself. You could ask Mr. Cooper for any old thing and he’d find it right away. Sometimes it meant digging through to the back of the shelves, but he always had what you were looking for.

  By the time I was nine, my mother would let me go to the store by myself, so of course I was always offering to go. Even for the littlest thing. I would run there. She’d say she needed a loaf of bread and I’d be out the door before she could tell me it could wait until her next trip.

  It got to be I was going back and forth so much, I started running errands for people in the neighborhood. Mr. Perry next door would see me take off and he’d stop me, ask me to pick up a can of shaving cream or something. He’d give me a couple of bucks, kick me the change when I got back. This turned into a lucrative little side business. After a bit, I was swimming in comic books and candy.

  But you know what the big moment was? The moment that changed everything? There was this kid on my block. Ray Carson. He was a big kid, built like an ox, and kind of quiet, but real nice. So one day I come out of the store with an armload of groceries—I had probably six or seven stops to make before going home—and it damn near felt like my arms were going to fall off.

  Ray is standing there up against the wall of the store, eating a candy bar, and I say to him, “Ray, want to give me a hand? I’ll give you a little money for your trouble.” Ray says sure, he’ll help, because what kid doesn’t
want a little spending money?

  I give him a couple of the bags and we get everything dropped off, faster than I would have been able to do it by myself. At the end I took all my tip money and gave some of it to Ray, and he was pretty happy, so we kept on doing that. I’d take the orders and do the shopping; he’d help me carry everything and deliver. Got to be I upgraded from candy and comic books to video games and model rockets. The nice ones with a million parts that never all seemed to be in the box.

  After a little while I had kids who saw how well Ray Carson was making out, and they’d ask if they could work for me, too. So I said sure, and it got to be where the people living on my block never really had to leave the house.

  And it made me feel good. It was nice to see my mom be able to sit down and paint her nails rather than run around like a lunatic, which is what she was doing most days, on account of me and my dad.

  Things were going so well that one night, I decide, I’m going to take my parents out to dinner.

  We went to the Italian place next to Coop’s. I wore a white shirt and a black tie I bought special for that night, except I didn’t know how to tie it. I wanted to surprise my mom, come downstairs wearing it, but I ended up calling her upstairs to tie it for me. When she saw me standing there, trying to get the thing right, I thought her face would just about burst.

  So we head out, and we walked because it was a nice night, and the whole time my daddy was kidding around, thinking that when the bill came I’d get scared and he’d swoop in to save the day. But I’d checked the menu online and knew I had enough money to cover it.

  I got the chicken parmigiana. My mom got the chicken marsala and my daddy made a big show of it, got the surf and turf. When the bill came I picked it up and I took the bill folder and figured out the tip—10 percent, because my parents’ drinks came out late, and the waiter forgot to refill the bread bowl when we asked, and like my dad said, a tip is a reward for good service.