Chapter One
Sat in a chair that was becoming seriously uncomfortable, I stared mindlessly at the slowly blinking green light on the dashboard in front of me. It's 2 AM and I'm in a small office that may or may not have once been a storage closet. The grainy black and white security footage on the multiple screens at my desk has been the same since 11 PM and shows no sign of changing any time soon. I know I'm not supposed to, but I pull my phone out and begin scrolling through Facebook. Nothing new since I last checked it fifteen minutes ago, of course.
Just as I start to debate pulling up my smutty Kindle library I hear the jangling of keys and shove my phone aside. It clatters and ends up falling under my desk. Shit. I'll have to fish it out later. Right now, my headache is coming back.
"Hey, Charlotte." Nate's voice makes me jump and I look over my shoulder. He's shaved his patchy facial hair and it somehow makes him look rougher, more unkempt. "Just checking in." He tells me.
Like every other round he makes, of course. Nate's the patrolling security guard for Paragon, the facility I've just been hired to work for on the overnight shift. No one wanted these hours, especially for this position, so the pay is decent and it's really very easy. Or, it would be, if I didn't have a middle aged man coming after me like Pepé Le Pew goes after Penelope Pussycat. "Same as every other night." I shrugged, doing my best to give him as little to go on as possible. This man can drag out a conversation like no one else.
"Ah, yeah. You know, we used to have a guy who worked here for years. He said that he'd never seen the footage change in his forty years of working here." Nate said.
"Yeah, you mentioned that the other night." I reminded him, because he had told me that probably three times by now. "I'm gonna get started on these forms, try to keep myself on track tonight. I'll let you know if anything changes on my end." I said, tapping the walkie talkie that had not once left it's charging station on the edge of my desk. That solid green light would never die.
"Listen, uh," He entered the office and I groaned internally. Like always he stood too close and I could smell the Old Spice wafting off him in waves. "I know it gets pretty boring in here. Lonely, even." He leaned against the desk and I did my best not to look at his groin now planted directly in my line of sight. If I saw so much as a single twitch, even the smallest tent, I would lose this job for strangling him. "You don't have to use the radio just for emergencies, y'know. If you ever just wanna," He shifted his weight and slid closer, his head dipping down towards mine, which hadn't left it's place in my hands. "Chat, maybe get to know each other better...well, I'm always looking for new work friends." He grinned, yellow teeth bringing bile to my throat. I knew he smelled like cigarettes after his breaks, but I hadn't thought he'd be a chain smoker.
"Right." I gave him a thin smile. "I'll keep that in mind." I lied.
"If you wanna talk outside of work, too, you know I could always--" We both jerked when his radio buzzed to life with static.
"818, this is 747. Can I get you to do a walkthrough down on Level 4?" It sounded like Terry, the facility director. He was in a building across the grounds for which Nate was responsible for patrolling.
"Yeah, on my way." Nate replied, turning his head to speak into the radio on his shoulder. "Hate when they call me out to the western building." He sighed.
"817, please be advised your radio seems to be malfunctioning. Please check the call button is not locked." Terry's voice came through my own desk radio and I bit back a laugh as Nate's face turned red.
"Thanks, Terry. Sorry about that." I replied, reaching over as Nate came off my desk and seeing that the baton on his belt had pressed against the button on the side, holding it down as it was pressed against my single file cabinet. Straightening it on the desk, I pulled a folder and some loose papers from a drawer and selected a pen.
"Right, well." Nate cleared his throat. "Just let me know." He slowly walked backwards out the office, bumping against the doorframe before turning to face the right way.
"I will. Have a good night, Nate." I called, waiting until the jingling of his keys rounded the corner to push myself back on the wheels of my chair and shut the door. Rolling back over, I looked at the paperwork on my desk. God, the ten point font blurred together as I tried to read through each thing on the list. Every night, at 3 AM, I was supposed to check the equipment. Why? I have no idea. They didn't tell me these things. Looking at the screens, I wondered if my nightly tasks bothered the subject of my surveillance.
There were twelve subjects contained here. I had access to the feed for only one. In the single cell were cameras that could see every angle. There were no blind spots, not even inside the decontamination chamber at the entrance to the cell. I also had access to the cameras in the corridor outside the decontamination chamber, the hallways connected to it, and the outside of the building I was stationed in. All of us, the women who worked here overnight, had access to the cameras for the main areas.
Absent-mindedly, I started doodling the layout on the back of my form to kill some time. The main building was a dodecagon, or a twelve sided polygon. On each side, there was a long hallway that had only three doors; the one to enter the hallway, the labs on the right, and then the door at the end of the hallway which led into the decon room. For some reason, each door required a different keycard. I have level one clearance to enter the grounds, level two for the main building, level three for the labs, but I did not have level four clearance to enter the containment chambers. At least, not yet. I'd been told that, after my 90 day evaluation, I'd be permitted that keycard. For now, if I ran into any trouble, I was to call Terry at the grounds surveillance office, and then request assistance from Nate.
Yeah, it was a lot of hoops to jump through, but it paid about $20 an hour and had great benefits. Plus, it was mostly just sitting around. I shredded the paper. We weren't allowed to put things like this on paper. We weren't even allowed to take anything out with us when we left. My shift began and ended the same way each morning, with a frisk and metal detector, courtesy of Nate. He enjoyed his 12 hour shifts way too much.
It was 2:25 AM and I decided to head to my break. "Hey, Terry. You good if I snag a bite to eat?" I asked.
"10-4, 817." He replied, and the blinking red dot on my cameras became a solid feature, indicating that he was monitoring them from his own enormous office in the building by the gates. Pushing away from the desk, I very awkwardly reached behind it to try and pull up the cords my pop socket was snagged on. It was slow going, and I had to put my cheek to the screen to get my arm down there, but a few minutes of awkwardly bending over and fishing blindly and my phone emerged, no worse for wear.
As I walked into the break room I was surprised to find three of the other women there. Oops. We'd need to better coordinate these breaks. Terry had to cover for us whenever we left our station. "Hey, Charlie." Nicole greeted me around a mouthful of her usual chicken wrap. "Heard Nate tryin' to put the moves on you." She teased.
"Shit, did the whole compound hear that?" I asked with a groan. Now everyone would think we were some cute puppydog-lovey-dovey couple when I really just wanted to knock him out most nights.
"If it helps, we were almost as uncomfortable about it as you were." Katie assured me as I pulled a chair out and sat down to eat my lunch. "Almost." She made a face.
"He doesn't put the moves on any of you?" I asked. They all shared a look. "God dammit." I had thought he was just a weird guy. Turns out he was my own personal creep.
