Issue #13 | Excerpt, "A Man, Running"
“You’re late.”
Alisa opened her eyes to Mitzumi sitting in her desk chair. “I was here before you,” she said, her voice rough with sleep.
Mitzumi flicked his eyes to the side, and Alisa focused on the figure she hadn’t noticed before. Craig. Their supervisor’s supervisor, whom she only ever saw when she was hired. He was not smiling.
“Oh, Craig,” Alisa said, putting all of her limited morning professionalism into her voice. “Last night, I stayed extra to work—”
“Don’t care,” Craig said. He turned to Mitzumi. “We’ve found your partner. Now let’s go.”
Out of Craig’s field of vision, Mitzumi smiled in apology, but it was a pained smile. Something was wrong. Something big.
Craig turned and vanished out of sight. Mitzumi reached down to help Alisa out, and even though the end result was more awkward than if she’d gotten up herself, she accepted his outstretched hand. After last night’s confrontation with Scott, she just wanted some simple, friendly human contact.
“What’s going on?” she asked, then noticed that the rest of the room was filled with people at their cubicles, pretending not to stare at the woman who’d been sleeping under her desk. She looked around at them all, forcing an unrepentant smile. “Oh, like you haven’t.”
Once they were out of the room, Mitzumi’s expression darkened. “He’s gone.”
The observation glass was broken, blood streaking what was left. Taufiq was in the runner’s hall, face down in a puddle of blood. Glass crunched under her shoes as she walked forward, hands outstretched as though this were all a hologram she could disprove with a touch.
“Where’s Leonie?”
“Our clinic,” Craig said, his tone making it seem like her being there was Alisa’s fault.
She couldn’t help getting angry. “And why’s Taufiq still there?”
“Because he was dead when security found him. Leonie was not. After the police come and do their thing, we’ll take his body out. It’s not like the room serves a purpose right now, anyway.” Craig turned around to face them. “What happened. Find out.”
Even with the observation glass shattered and Taufiq’s body on the floor, Alisa still saw the ghost of the runner traveling the hallway. She’d seen him run so many times his precise actions were burned into her mind.
“How are we supposed to find out what happened?”
Craig nodded towards Taufiq. “Regarding the runner, you two are the only experts we have remaining. So get to work.”
He left, his job clearly done.
There was a familiar smell in the air. Alisa recognized it as blood.
***
Alisa and Mitzumi sat in the hallway outside their lab. Mitzumi wrote in a pocket notebook with a wood and silver pen he’d received for his one-year work anniversary. It regularly clogged, so he wiped the tip on his dark pants every few moments to keep the ink running smooth.
“Do we even know the runner’s name?”
“I don’t.” Mitzumi sighed. “I never needed to. I mean, he was right there, running. It would be like learning the name of a lab rat.”
“A lab rat’s not a person.”
Mitzumi shrugged. “Debatable.”
“Taufiq’s dead, and Leonie’s possibly going to die, and you’re making jokes?”
“That wasn’t a joke. And we can’t do anything for them. All we can do is our job.”
Alisa kicked the far wall. It made a disappointing thud. “Our job was to keep tabs on a man endlessly running down a hallway.”
The hallway was empty of other employees, the labs on either side of the hall unused. A wide-shouldered woman turned into the hallway, looked at Alisa and Mitzumi sitting like kids on the floor waiting to be seen by the principal, and went right back the way she’d come. Above them lights flickered and hissed, most of the fluorescents at the end of their life. With the runner gone, their jobs upended, this entire section of Redux Labs seemed obsolete.
“We have to do something,” Mitzumi said. Alisa glanced over at his notebook. A numbered list, each number followed by a question mark, sometimes several.
She stood. “You stay here and go through everything in the lab. Maybe there’s files or something, I don’t know. I’m going to talk with Leonie.”
She left before Mitzumi could argue, just like with Scott the night before. The similarity bothered her, as though she were just like the running man, stuck in an endless loop with no definite end and no clear beginning. At the end of the hall, she glanced back. Mitzumi hadn’t moved, tapping his pen on the notebook.
Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, and Analog. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second poetry book, Orphanotrophia, was recently published by Cobalt Press.