The Relatively Long Game: Part 5

“Oh, hey, wow, no kidding.” Lily exclaimed. “You’re pretty young though. Still, good on you for the job. And, about there being something going on, I totally hear you. Something happened here a couple years back that made me suspicious as well. I pretty much had just started then. You wanna hear?”

“Well, um, I’m on lunch break, kinda.”

“Don’t worry, it’s not that long, and I’ll try and tell it pretty fast, alright.”

Emily was wary, but still interested. “Continue…” she said, a little nervous.

“Alright,” Lily began. “Just so you know, you can’t tell anyone about this. I think that the big boss still doesn’t know that I know, which is good, ‘cause he could get me fired if he wanted. So, this all began, like I said, right after I started, all the way back in ’11, probably when you were in high school. I was working the night shift back then, starting at about seven, and going until four in the morning. It really was the graveyard shift, though I felt worse for the person who got there when I got off, ‘cause she had to wake up so early, y’know? Anyway, I kinda didn’t expect much to happen, but, towards January or February, people started pouring in around eleven, and stayed long enough to where I wasn’t around when they left. And, they would have Landon ID badges, right, but they wouldn’t go up to the Landon offices.

“I can tell where people go,” she explained, “and half the time they’d go to the servers on floor three, which is weird, because most of the servers are in the basement anyway.”

Emily remembered the request that she and signed off on. Those servers the R&D guys wanted, they were on Floor 3 as well. She would have interjected with this, except Lily kept barreling forward. “The other half, they’d be up on the top floor, which is also weird ‘cause no one ‘owns’ that, per se. And they must have been doing important stuff, ‘cause they kept coming in with huge thermoses of coffee, right? As if they were gonna be working all night.

“So, then, this one February, these people just come in the front door, that one right there, and they were obviously really young. There was a small one with eyeliner who looked drunk out of his mind, and then this other one with spiked up hair, which looked off. Then there was an awkward looking girl with this hoodie, like a normal teenager, and a kid in a skirt with a hell of a lot of grey lipstick and nail paint on. Where do you even get grey lipstick? Anyways, the spiky haired one comes and starts flirting with me, and he’s kind of cute, and I decide to let them through since I think they’re with the boss, maybe. He likes to bring in people I don’t know. Only, they must have taken the stairs, which I don’t know how to look at them on, or maybe they just broke the elevator camera or something, so I just sit here and read a book. But then, later that night, boom! A bomb just randomly goes off and then I see those four just running off, and the one who flirted with me was all holding his side, which had some blood. I was freaking.

“And then, of course, a whole bunch of guys in suits, including the boss, come back a couple of minutes later and they go off looking for them, and they talk to me, and I say I don’t know anything, and they believe me, since they can’t get the video from the security cameras. But I saw the whole thing, though. And these guys, with the suits, they had guns like the FBI, except they’re not the FBI and I don’t even know what’s happening because I only know what I saw, not what they were doing up there. And then the police come and they interview me, and I say the same thing: that I don’t know what happened, and I let those four in, because I had to acknowledge that ‘cause they had the security tapes and they could see me flirting.

And then, worst of all, they suspended me for a whole month, and I though I was going to lose my job. But yeah, something fishy was obviously going on with that whole thing. I mean, otherwise, why would someone bomb them? Yeah, there’s all sorts of weird things going on. What was it you saw, anyway?”

Emily spoke now. “Oh, they had me looking over the computer time requests, and I saw that there was a lot of time requested for some servers on floor 3, like you said from your story, and then the guy who hired me comes by and twists my arm into signing off on the request. He said he would lose his job if I didn’t do it, but he didn’t seem to scared of losing his job.”

“Yeah, remember how I said those guys would come in at weird hours? Well, now, when I start my shift, I talk to the new graveyard shift guy, and he says that they’re doing the same thing, and people are coming in looking mysterious. Maybe it’s the same thing. I wouldn’t come in, maybe, for the next while, especially at night, in case those same kids come back and blow up the place again. People died last time, I think. Maybe not. I hope not.

“Anyway, nice talking to ya, but I kind of need to go now. If I spend too much time talking to you, they might notice and fire me, or maybe worse.”

“Oh, yeah, and I should probably get some lunch in me.” Emily turned curtly and left, feeling a little more frightened than she had previously. After lunch, she returned to the office, giving Lily a wink on the way past. She sat at her desk for the rest of the time, too afraid to get up and leave until, at last, the time came for her to go home. She had very little homework to distract  her, since final reviews were coming up and her teachers didn’t want the students too stressed. Of course, she wasn’t stressed about schoolwork. Not anymore.