She walked over to Stacie’s desk and stooped to find the old gray-brown Selectric underneath the desk. The thing felt like an anchor as she slid it out along the worn carpet. Tiny broken carpet fibers sprayed out as the nap crumbled. Her left foot snagged on a burr, and the panty hose ran from ankle to knee. “Shit,” she mumbled, then hefted the typewriter, waddling with it back to her own desk.
She kicked off her heels and wiggled her toes on the hard plastic chair mat to get the circulation back. The mat felt tacky against her feet.
Not even 9:30 in the morning, and she already felt sweaty and uncomfortable. Why had she worn one of her nicest business suits today? Why did she keep playing the game?
Claims poured in by the thousands as panic spread. She shuffled through the paperwork, seeing a marked change from simple car breakdowns to damage caused by disintegrating plastic components in machinery.
She swallowed, overwhelmed but still unwilling to believe the magnitude of the disaster. Such things couldn’t really happen. Someone would figure out how to stop it soon, and then they could pick up the pieces, pay off the claims, and get back to normal.
But all this was too much, getting worse every hour. She had seen the changes in Flagstaff just in the last couple of days, when the first breakdowns occurred. It reminded her of weather in the mountains, when a bright day could knot with ugly thunderheads within an hour. Maybe an even worse storm gathered right now, and she had come to work like an idiot instead of running for shelter.
Not concentrating, Heather let her fingers tangle on the Selectric’s keys—it had been years since she had used a typewriter, and she found herself backspacing and using the correction key every other word. The keys stuck repeatedly, and the machine made odd clunking noises when she typed; Heather supposed there were just as many small plastic parts in an electric typewriter as there were in the computers. For the time being, the carbons would be screwed up, and she would have to use white-out. Then somebody would have to rekey everything into the database whenever the computers got up and running again. If they ever got running.
“What are you doing, Heather?” Sysco said. “Don’t bother with the typing now, for chrissake! You can stay late to catch up on that. Pick up the phone and get these people off my ass! I think the lines are up now.”
She stared at the typewriter. “You told me to type these, Al.”
He rolled his eyes and sighed at her. His face reminded her of a llama’s. “You’re doing it again, Heather: thinking. Just do what I tell you to do. You don’t need to think.”
She was thinking all right, thinking about jamming a metal wastebasket on Al Sysco’s head and doing a tap dance on his temples.
Stacie finally staggered into the office a little after noon. She had ridden her bicycle on the rims of two flat tires. “Crazy people out in the streets. Nobody knows what to do!” Heather took no consolation in listening to Al yell at Stacie.
When she pulled out her lunch sack to unwrap a tuna sandwich, the plastic bag had turned into goo, seeping into her bread. Heather stared at it. The plague was working its way through the office, floating through the air, attacking anything it could eat.
She looked at the fake wood-grain coating on her metal desk, at the plastic pens in her cup, at the plastic knobs on her office chair, at the plastic buttons on her clothes. What next? At any moment, some key support component in the Surety building itself might fall apart, causing the walls and ceiling to crash in.
She did not want to stay here another minute.
She picked up the phone in a reflex action as Sysco charged back to her desk. “Heather, take over my station. I have to meet with the crisis team. Might take me an hour.”
Heather straightened in her seat, still clutching the phone. As her anger grew, her pastel-pink fingernails made deep indentations into the softening plastic of the telephone handset.
“Sorry, Al, but I’m not qualified to do that kind of work. I might botch it up. I don’t dare touch it.” She stood up, cold and calm inside. The eye of the storm.
“What did you say? I don’t have time for this, Heather!” Sysco’s eyes looked as if they might pop right out of their sockets. “This is important—”
Heather snatched her lunch sack and handed it to him. The dissolving plastic had made a creeping stain on the brown paper bag. “Here, Al—have a tuna sandwich.” She turned to Stacie. “I wouldn’t put up with this creep any longer than you have to, Stacie. See ya.”
She wanted to watch Sysco’s expression turn splotched and livid as she strode to the stairwell, but she did not dare turn around. Her legs shook as she hurried down the echoing concrete steps. Her shoes felt strange, as if they no longer fit right. Great! Her heels would probably dissolve before long.
She left the Surety Insurance headquarters building, doubting she would ever set foot inside again.
Out in the parking lot, she marched onto the hot pavement, forcing herself not to run, ignoring the ache in her calves, giving no thought to the long walk facing her before she reached the safety of home. The world might be falling apart, all right, but she didn’t feel any particular attachment to the old order of things. She could leave it behind with no regrets. Screw them all. It was time to take care of herself.
Sitting in the reserved parking space, Al Sysco’s silver Porsche gleamed in the sun. He had owned it less than three months, and he still washed and waxed it every weekend. He had bought it to celebrate stealing her promotion, and she knew it.
She stared at the Porsche. It looked like a snarling metallic insect. Insects were for squashing, weren’t they?
Heather opened her canvas purse and pulled out the nearly full bottle of pastel-pink nail polish. She hated the color, hated nail polish in the first place; she wore it only as part of professional dress in the insurance company. Now she had a better use for it, if the plague didn’t somehow dissolve the enamel first. She twisted off the softening cap and dribbled the enamel in swirls over the driver’s side windshield. Once the nail polish baked a few hours in the hot Arizona sun, Albert “You can call me Al!” Sysco would need an ice pick to get it off.
“You can call me vindicated, Al,” she said, then set off for home, on foot.
Al Sysco fled the Surety Insurance headquarters at seven o’clock that evening. Everyone else had left hours before, but he was in charge. He was the responsible man on the job. The entire day had been hell. The California gasoline plague kept getting worse, showing up in all parts of the world, according to the reports. Industry was in a panic, big cities were in turmoil—and it seemed as if every human being on planet Earth wanted to take it out on him.
Dusk had fallen, and the streetlights stood dark and dead. The power had flickered on and off all afternoon, and Sysco wondered if dissolving electrical insulation would end up starting fires. One more thing for the insurance company to worry about!
Heather Dixon had walked out in the middle of the day, and Al vowed to see her fired as soon as all this was over with—but right now he prayed she would come back.
Stacie was a slow and plodding worker, and Candace was just a trainee. They couldn’t do anything right, and Candace had spent half the day in tears. He had physically shaken her by the shoulders, yelling that they were in a crisis situation, dammit! It didn’t do any good. He could not survive another day like this one. He wished somebody would start solving this plague problem.
He stopped in front of his Porsche, and his mouth dropped open. In the dim light, it looked like a gigantic glob of birdshit had splattered his windshield. He looked closer. “Nail polish! Sweet as an armpit! Gawd!” He tapped it with his nails, but the opaque pink coating could have been electroplated on.