Resurgam

by Lisa Short

The email appears in Laura’s inbox that afternoon—OnShore deciding that the pandemic has receded enough or its employees are vaccinated enough; or perhaps their tiny corporate souls are no longer able to endure all that space, all that rented space, remaining empty of the bodies they pay so poorly to work inside it. OnShore is not one of Laura’s favorite clients.

Dear Laura: Please stop by and make sure all the workstations are up and running! Staff will be returning to work tomorrow! Laura is in the middle of a tricky debugging exercise and doesn’t want to leave it, and then she’s hungry so she grabs a bite to eat—by the time she pulls into the parking lot outside the OnShore office, it’s after eight o’clock.

She regrets those delays now. The building is smack in the middle of an aging industrial park, deserted in the waning light of the setting sun. Pre-pandemic, when Laura came out on calls, the receptionist always joked about the building being haunted. There had been a fire there, back in the previous century, and a bunch of workers had gotten trapped and died due to a lack of fire doors, or fire escapes, or something.

The badge reader beside the OnShore Outbound Call Center—Your Customers are Our Business! sign is a crimson beacon in the glass-walled darkness of the lobby. It smells faintly of Lysol; the cleaning staff must have been notified too, though they’re obviously all gone for the day. Laura’s sneakers sink into the deep pile carpet as she crosses to the OnShore call center door.

She digs her badge, unused for so many months, out of her backpack and swipes it across the reader; the door unlatches with a sharp snick. Laura pushes it open, groping along the wall until she finds the bank of light switches. OnShore never bothered replicating the frosted-glass grandeur of the lobby inside their windowless box of a call center, and it will be pitch-black inside once the door closes behind her.

A quick flip of a switch and another snick!, loud in the deserted silence, drenches the room in harsh yellow light. Dingy walls, stained carpet, cheap plywood workstations—OnShore has made a few concessions to the twenty-first-century workplace by installing a sleazy-looking treadmill up against the wall and a Keurig knock-off on a battered table in the corner. Their very paucity is almost more depressing than their absence would have been.

The monitor screens all face the call center entrance, so the supervisor can presumably nip inside and quickly spot any forbidden Internet surfing on company time. Laura sits down at the first workstation, her back by necessity to the door, and powers it on. The Windows splash screen pops up promptly, an excellent sign; she logs in with her administrator’s password, admiring the neat rows of icons popping into existence on the screen. Pop, pop, pop—

—snick.

Laura’s hand realizes something is off before her head does. Her fingers freeze atop the mouse a split second before the rest of her stiffens. Nothing she’s doing with the workstation should result in a snick. Especially not one that sounds just like the office door latching.

In her mind, she turns around to face the door just in time to see one of the cleaning staff standing framed in the doorway, grinning ruefully—I forgot my bag! And Laura laughs and commiserates, That happens to me all the time!

But she doesn’t actually do any of that. She remains frozen in her chair instead as the silence behind her back lengthens, crawling up her spine with sharp, icy fingers.

Maybe she just imagined the snick.

She should turn around and look.

Laura grits her teeth, then spins the chair around. Nothing—the door is firmly shut and the call center is empty. Though she can’t quite see underneath that bank of workstations next to the treadmill—but nobody could have gotten there from the door without her having spotted them first.

Of course they couldn’t have.

So, what she really needs to do is just finish up here—as quickly as possible, and if she finds a problem she can always come back tomorrow—in broad daylight, when the office won’t be such a goddamn benighted tomb.

Laura scoots the chair over to the second workstation and powers it on. Click, click—that’s just her fingers on the keyboard; it’s absolutely her imagination that makes it sound like every other keystroke has a sly echo, as if someone is timing the snick of the door latch to coincide with each click of the keys.

Something is irritating her throat. Laura coughs, then sniffs the air. A faint, acrid scent—something…burning? She jerks back from the monitor; the smell strengthens abruptly, the tang of scorched wood and the rich, fatty scent of pork frying in the oven. Her head whips around, back towards the door where she knows this time, she’ll see nothing—

—snick.

The office door is just swinging shut, blocking out the frosted dark sliver of the lobby beyond it. Three girls stand grouped before it, smiling at her.

“Hello!” says the girl in the middle—except she isn’t smiling, after all. The long, slender pegs of her gumless teeth are shining like ivory under the harsh fluorescent lights because something has eaten away all the flesh on her cheeks. “We’ve gotten used to being alone—but now it seems we have company again!” Laura scrabbles backward. She tries to scream, but she is choking on smoke she can only feel, not see; all that emerges is a high thin whine. “The doors wouldn’t open, did you know that? When we tried to run away. But now all the doors open whenever we like! And it was dark then, so dark with the smoke, and burning everywhere—” Her hand, twisted and blackened, steals up the wall beside her, towards the bank of light switches. “Like this.”

Snick.

Lisa Short is a Texas-born, Kansas-bred writer of fantasy, science fiction and horror. She has an honorable discharge from the United States Army, a degree in chemical engineering, and twenty years’ experience as a professional engineer. Lisa can be found online at lisashortauthor.com, facebook.com/LisaShortWrites, and on Twitter @Lisa_K_Short