Somewhat Henderson
Chapter 2: Somewhat Henderson
The smell of cheap coffee was the first sensation.
I saw an array of cubicles filled with people dressed in costumes typing away on their keyboards. There were maybe twenty to thirty cubicles in this office. How many offices there were in total, I could only guess.
As I stepped out of the broom closet, there was a guy to the left of me. He was startled. He was scrolling on his phone in his right hand. He was wearing a raccoon costume. And I don't mean he had some striped clothes on, or a striped hat with a painted face. He was fully enveloped in this inflated costume of a raccoon, the head disproportionally large.
"Oh! I'm so sorry! I didn't know you were in there! I was just fidgeting with the switch," he explained. "Nice costume, by the way!" He raised his unoccupied hand and shot me with a finger gun. Then he turned around and walked away.
That's it. I'm going fucking insane. But I don't believe I'd lost that much blood by that point. Not enough to be delirious. Morphine by itself doesn't cause delirium. Was I shell shocked? No, I was too lucid to be shell shocked.
There was no medical explanation. So I pried further.
I closed the door behind me and fully committed to the space. It was a sterile office, but nobody seemed to mind that I was tracking Himalayan snow-sludge everywhere. They were too pre-occupied chattering away at their keyboards.
I looked at a calendar that was stapled to the wall. It had black bats and bright orange pumpkins on it with smiling faces. Right, it had just dawned on me that today was Halloween. That explains the costumes. I was clinging to any plausible explanation for the situation I was in, and I was very fortunate to have found at least one.
Still, nothing had yet explained what a bunch of white-collar type-monkeys were doing near a biolab. What were they hiding?
The raccoon-man thought I was wearing a costume. Hey, I'd believe it too if I saw me. I probably looked like someone completely absorbed by the bit, down to the blood and the grime on my face and all.
So I walked through the office, in between the cubicles, like I belonged. I just needed to find one empty desk. If I could access their computers, I could uncover crucial information.
That's when I found it. An unoccupied desk. I sat down on the black chair, with no care for the stain I would leave on it. The computer was powered on. Maybe its user was in the bathroom. No big deal — if they come to reclaim their space, I could just tell them that the computer was making a weird sound or something. And graciously return their rightful mesh throne to them.
But there was something on the desk. A paper tag face-down on the desk, on a clip. I turned it around. It read: S. Henderson, Senior Communications Officer. Senior, huh. Sounds important. I clipped it on the right side of my chest. I probably needed one if I was going to blend in.
I tapped the keyboard. The monitor sprung to life. It had a e-mail client open.
Huh. That was easy. Honestly, good. I don't know jack shit about computers. I wasn't ready for a heroic hacking montage.
I scrolled through the inbound and outbound mail. But they didn't give me any valuable clues. Your usual office politics. I guess Mister Henderson was a low ranking officer of some kind. All I found was notes of a publishing schedule, time-off requests, pay stubs. The latest outgoing e-mail was directed to "[email protected]". It was a request for a sick day on October 31st — today. Henderson had come down with a fever, apparently. This was Mister Courier's reply:
"DENIED FUCK U" with a middle finger emoji at the end and a "Sent from an iPhone." at the bottom.
A model manager, I see.
But that domain name. It jumped out to me. SlopFeed. And that unmistakable mascot — a cartoon pig, kinda like Looney Tunes, smiling warmly and giving a thumbs up.
What the hell was a listicle website doing out in the Himalayas? I doubt they have a vetted interest in the snowy mountains. "Top 10 Piles of Snow You Just Can't Miss" shocked emoji face.
I kept scrolling through Henderson's inbox hoping to find some other clues. But I was interrupted by a blonde woman. She was wearing a white suit and a pink tie. Though I'm surprised her fluffy pink cat ears didn't catch my attention first.
She looked straight at her enormous phone, not looking away from it even for a moment. But she knew exactly where she was going and how not to trip. It's like she had fully molded herself to this office. She had a name tag too — S. Wicks. Creative Director.
"Hey, Hendersoooooon?" she said. She dragged the name out like she’s done it a thousand times before. "What do you think for the noon push? Like, 'Actress Sonya Hail's SCANDALOUS Photos Leaked,' or something more like… 'DEPRAVED Photos Leaked'? I feel like 'depraved' has better SEO traction for the under-25 demographic, but Myra in legal says it might trigger a flag. What's your vibe?"
I was stunned. I didn't know what to say. What do you even say to something like that? What the fuck is an SEO? The prolonged silence did pull a glance out of her.
She had to do a double take. I hoped she would be blinded by the impressive realism of my "costume."
"Waaaaaait, you're not Henderson."
Fuck. My chest locked up. My fingers froze over the mouse. I braced for the alarm, the security team, the extraction. My other hand was shaking so bad I had to grip those red scissors like I was still packing my bullet wound.
"Weeeeeeell…" she dragged, tilting her head and squinting her eyes.
"If you squint a little bit…" she took a long slurp from her pink plastic tumbler. The straw gave that agonizing, empty gurgle of someone refusing to admit their drink is finished. It was a violent assault on my eardrums.
"You're somewhat Henderson."
Somewhat Henderson. Somewhat. Henderson. These words echoed through my dome, on repeat. Somewhat Henderson. Somewhat Henderson. Somewhat Henderson.
"Hendersoooooon?" she tapped her fake fingernails in triples against her pink cup. Click-click-click. Click-click-click. Click-click-click. "Hellooo? Earth to Henderson. Did the Halloween candy give you a food coma already?"
"Depraved," I told her. My voice sounded like a shovel scraping across gravel.
"Right?!" She smiled, took a slurp of melted ice and air. "Totally. Thanks, Hendersooooon! You're a lifesaverrrrrr."
A lifesaver. That's what she called me. After everything I'd gone through.
My left hand with scissors was still trembling. She looked at it.
"Oooohh, I'm gonna have to borrow those." She grabbed the scissors on the outside of those blades. Out of instinct, I refused to let go.
She looked me in the face and frowned like a puppy begging for a treat. "Pleeeeease? Pretty pleeeeease?" That's when I realized I was holding onto a lethal weapon I wasn't going to need. I surrender the scissors.
"Thank youuuu!" She turned around and strutted away, marching straight down my line of sight. I didn't even have the energy to blink. I just tracked her pink cat ears and a tail swinging left and right from below her black skirt through my peripheral vision until she vanished past the next row of desks.
But before I could exhale — I swear to God, she teleported behind me. That identical cadence re-emerged suddenly.
"Hendersooooon!"
I jumped in my seat and screamed. When I turned around, I saw her. Wicks! Except her tie and cat ears were green, same with her tumbler. The whole office was staring at us.
"Oh, sorry for sneaking up behind you like that! I just wanted to remind you to fill out your employee satisfaction survey by the end of day today. It's on your WeekEnd dashboard."
This woman just teleported behind me, and she was talking about some satisfaction survey. In my dumb stupor, I stuttered out "b-b-but you're…"
She laughed. "I'm Becca. The HR lady?" Looking at her name tag, it was different. R. Wicks, Human Resources. R = Rebecca. Right. "Stacy and I dressed up as each other today. She's dressed as me, I'm dressed as Stacy. Isn't that fuuuuun?" She sipped from her green tumbler. Fortunately, that one was still very full of liquid.
"Y-yeah… f-fun…"
"Nice costume, by the way! You really went all out today! With the fake blood and all! Just don't let Paul catch you smearing all that grime on over his carpets." She strutted away, following in her, what I at this point presumed to be, her twin sister's footsteps.
So Stacy is the green one. Usually.
Some minutes went by uninterrupted. Most of them were spent decompressing. This office won't let me rest, so I'll take every moment of silence I can get, even if it's interrupted by occasional murmurs and accompanied by a constant stream of keyboards clacking.
And the white noise from my radio.
It was faint. Indistinct, almost. I completely forgot about my radio until the chaos around me had quieted down and I could hear the static again. I had them plugged into my headset earlier, but they flew off my head when the helicopter crashed. But finding out I still had the radio with me — it was a huge relief. It was the only thing I hadn't lost today.
I immediately turned it off, as soon as I realized I was trying to broadcast an FM signal to my HQ deep in enemy territory. Though buried in the Himalayan valleys, I doubt it was getting far anyway. The airways were effectively a graveyard.
But this place had internet. They needed internet to work, clearly. These articles had to go out somehow. Which was good news for me because the radios we were equipped with — they had a backup channel which routed through the internet, rather than FM waves.
I just had to get this thing online. Then I could contact the commander and let him know of my situation. Shit, he probably thought I was dead by that point.