About Night at the Office

by Drew Zachary
10 pages / 3600 words
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc, epub, Sony-optimized pdf

Quiet nights are ideal for a security guard, but when Greg decides to look for the source of some strange noises, he discovers something out of the ordinary. Seems the regular late-night workaholic has a mighty interesting to-do list. Lucky Greg: it's his job to make sure everything is running smoothly in his section.

Sample

Greg Ewing was making his second set of rounds for the evening in the Quartermain building, humming softly to himself as he went. It was relatively early in his shift, just coming up to ten-thirty, but the office complex was dead quiet. This section, his section, was only six levels and the offices pretty much cleared out after business hours. That left him with a nightshift full of timed walks, a lot of radio chatter with the guys in the other sections, and a lot of magazines to read.

His neat stack of reading material was devoted to motorcycles. He knew what he wanted, and spent many an hour poring over specs and day-dreaming about the rides he was going to take. Then he'd go home, fall into bed, and have a few hours of actual dreams before he went to his day job, working at Tyler and Son's Auto Mechanics. The night guard thing was going to buy him a new bike, but his first love was mechanics; it always would be. There was no way he could do this kind of job forever; he'd die of boredom.

He took the stairs to the fourth floor, noted the time, and started walking down the hallway. He was still humming, the same little snatch of a song he couldn't remember the words to, and he took a look in each open office door as he went. Some lights were on, some were off, but there wasn't a soul to be seen. Computers worked, flashing screen savers at him, and in one office, a digital picture frame cycled through photos of someone's kids.

"Huh." Greg watched it for a while, bemused. "Don't that beat all?"

No one answered him, and he kept on going, his boots creaking slightly as he walked. At the end of the hall, he turned to the right and headed down the next stretch, moving toward the middle of the level. He'd do the outside perimeter and then move to the center, then take the elevator to the next floor. There, he'd trace his steps in reverse, working his way back to the stairs.

Die. Of. Boredom.

As he got to the far end of the fourth floor, he heard the first noise coming from the big corner office. It had to be Mr. Wittmeyer at Wittmeyer Solutions. The guy seemed to be a bit of a workaholic -- always in his office, bent over books or on the phone. The guy wasn't bad looking, either. Probably about Greg's own age, he had short brown hair and hazel eyes and one of those jaws you'd have to call chiseled. Greg realized he had no idea how tall the guy was -- he'd never seen Wittmeyer anywhere but firmly planted in his chair.

As he got closer, the sounds got clearer and they didn't sound like Wittmeyer on the phone. At all.