666 Lone Tree Way in Brentwood was a bastion of consumerism, a strip mall of stores like Target and Wal Mart, peppered with fast food eateries, makeup boutiques and the random book and electronic stores. There was a different branded bank on every corner adjacent to rivaling coffee franchises.
Charlotte had been here more times than she could count but she had never noticed the mirror-clad skyscraper in the middle of all these stores ands shops. Now that she was actively looking for the place, it was impossible to miss. It stuck out in the middle of the flat valley like a shard of refracting ice in the desert.
As she stepped off the bus and looked up, she saw the entire building was made of frosted glass, reflecting the world back at itself. She looked ahead to the front doors and saw herself walking toward them, reaching out, taking into her hand a metal handle that had no business being this cold on such a hot day. She opened the door and went inside, shivering—no, shaking at the sudden drop in temperature.
The lobby she stepped into was the color of smoldering coals left and forgotten in the bottom of the grill long after the cookout had concluded. The floor was a dark stone that felt textured under her feet, almost dusty and she wondered if it would leave footprints across any lighter surface. Gray and white marble pillars lined each side of the room and beyond them were overstuffed couches and leather chairs. The lobby was empty, this included the half-moon front desk that divided the lobby area from the rooms beyond.
Charlotte approached the desk. Looked around. Leaned up onto her tiptoes, out of her heels and looked behind the counter. Empty.
“Hello,” she called. Her voice echoed over every hard surface in the room. “Is anyone there?”
She turned back in the direction from where she’d come.
Don’t be late, the voice on the phone had said. She checked her watch. She was seven minutes early.
She turned back to the desk and almost screamed. Where there had been no one only a moment ago, now stood a woman.
Where had she come from and how had Charlotte not heard her enter?
The woman was dressed in something between charcoal and black—a sooty suit open in the middle, holding her curvy form in crisscrossing straps.
Was she wearing leather? Vinyl? Charlotte mused to herself. What kind of job was this? She was hoping to make a break from the Industry, not jump right back into it. And this was starting to smell like some of the weird VIP shit that some of her coworkers had whispered about but never truly experienced. Or maybe they had? Maybe it really was like Fight Club. Needless to say, she had never been invite…until, now?
“May I help you?” the woman asked. Her voice sounded distant, as if she were talking through a static filled phone, from another country, during a hurricane. The words—all four of them were slick with distraction, almost confusion, as if she really wasn’t supposed to be there, or anywhere for that matter.
“I’m Charlotte, Russe,” she had given her stage name. Why had she done that?
Because the other name didn’t exist anymore.
Why not make up another?
Because for all she knew this was just another exciting speed bump on the road to ruin she had so eloquently mapped out for herself.
“I have the four-thirty interview.”
“Right,” the woman said—a girl really. She looked like a girl playing the role of a woman and the way she dragged out that one word, right, by four or five extra ‘I’s’ would have been funny from anyone else, in any other circumstance. And when she tacked onto the end of this continuing sentence, “…this way,” as if the girl’s train of thought had just been high-jacked by someone else, Charlotte had to resist the urge to run from the building screaming in the terror she felt from this new kind of strange. She was a pea soup spewing exorcism away from gouging out her own eyes and throwing them into traffic.
Luckily for all parties involved, the receptionist’s head remained in a non-spinning position of rigidity and did not vomit any sort of green bile. Instead, she stepped from around the desk and gestured for Charlotte to follow her to the space beyond the lobby.
Charlotte gasped when the woman appeared to be not only void of pants, but also the proud owner of a rather large tail of considerable girth. She had also opted for limbs of the cloven variety.
Charlotte blinked and what she thought she’d seen was replaced by a pencil skirt much shorter than anything she would wear off-set and sharp stiletto heels. The tail and hooves were gone. Yet the clicking the of the receptionist’s heels on the stone floor seemed much more pronounced than the dainty footwear would suggest.
They left the lobby and entered a hallway that quickly became narrow—uncomfortably so where both petite woman were touching shoulders to the walls on either side. Charlotte took in a breath and the walls seemed to tighten around her. She let it out, and they contracted like a muscle. She breathed in again and the hallway moved inward. Out—what the fuck?
She tried to slow her breathing and managed to get it under control. The hallway eased up and soon they were walking with several feet to spare.
The receptionist rounded the corner. Charlotte hadn’t even seen where the hall ended and this new one began. One moment she was walking the endless path, and the next she had nearly hit a wall. She turned and nearly toppled into the receptionist, who stood before a great iron door, almost like the vault door at any big bank. Only this vault looked as if it protected more than mere money, or materials she would find valuable. Somehow, what was behind this door made her ideas of wealth seem so superficial.
The receptionist was working a rotary dial with a talon-like hand, while punching in numbers on a keypad with her other. A third hand was working a lever.
Wait a second? Third hand?
But it was gone, just life before. What Charlotte thought she saw—what she was beginning to believe were more than just hallucinations, had turned out to never really have been there at all.
It took several minutes of waiting without speaking, only hearing the clicks and turns of the gears within the vault before several pistons released and the door arched open. For a moment—a moment that seemed to drag on longer than it should, there was only darkness beyond the door. Then there was light—floodlights to be exact, shooting on from hidden recesses in a ceiling that looked more like a cave than part of this office building.
The room beyond was a warehouse, or an airplane hanger for an entire fleet of Air Buses. It seemed to stretch well beyond the confines of what the building’s exterior would suggest.
And in the center of it all, where all the light were pointing to, was a machine. Charlotte could only describe it in terms she knew. It was human in that it had arms and legs—albeit mechanical, and a torso that had more in common with several Mack trucks welded together. The machine—for that’s what it was, stood several stories tall. Were it to fall over, there would be nowhere for Charlotte or the receptionist to run. The shadow it cast seemed to cover all the known space in the room.
The receptionist moved toward the machine as if it were nothing more than a vending machine and she was going to purchase a soda, or a bag of salted nuts. Charlotte moved at a much more cautious pace, as if the machine were a living thing—a dinosaur perhaps, or a giant fucking robot ready to come to life. The receptionist—no doubt expecting the apprehension turned and winked, brandishing a c’mere gesture, as if they were old pals.
“It’s not going to crush us,” she said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.” Before Charlotte could come up with something—anything to say, the woman in the charcoal suit said, “What am I saying? Of course that’s what you’re worried about. That’s what you’re always worried about. But I’m proud of you. Most people don’t make it out of the hallway, and the few who do run scared when they see the Sarcophagus. So kudos to you.” She pointed her finger and thumb as if she were holding a gun, and made this odd clicking sound within the pocket of her cheek.
Coming from anyone else this would have looked normal, but from this strange woman, it looked over rehearsed, staged. It was like watching a poorly produced indie film—or yes, a porno. Charlotte felt her own cheeks grow red and warm but managed to hold it together. After all, she hadn’t run out of the hanger screaming, so that was something. Kudos, right?
As they approached Charlotte realized just how big the, Sarcophagus was, just how big the hanger they were in had to be and that the building she had entered couldn’t possible hold all of this. Each arm of the Sarcophagus was the length and size of the San Francisco zephyr carrying ten trains. That’s pretty specific but she had always had a thing for trains—a regular foamer.
The arms ended in giant fists that could easily hold a fleet of oil tankers as if they were nothing more than a bundle of TNT sticks from one of those old cartoons. Because of the floodlights, she could see that the humanoid look of the machine didn’t end with its limbs and chest. The Sarcophagus had a head—or rather, a cockpit that appeared to rotate off the body. Instead of eyes, there was a band of glass that reminded Charlotte of the VIP boxes at the football stadiums. Only these wrapped around the entire head giving the occupant a 360 degree view.
“What is it?” Charlotte found herself asking, in awe that she was here, that this was real. She was waiting for it to turn into a bulldozer or an excavator or something mundane the same way the receptionist had just appeared, or had had a tail or the hallway had threatened to crush her because it was in sync with her own panicked breaths. She waited to see this strange occurrence suddenly right itself just as everything else had.
Only it didn’t. It remained. And she found herself standing next to it and touching it. It looked like steel but felt warm under her pressed palm. It was alive! She pulled away.
“It is the Sarcophagus,” the receptionist repeated. As if that was all that needed to be said. Then she added, “you’ll pilot this in order to clean for the company.”
“The company?” Charlotte asked.
“Yes, the company,” as if that was all that needed to be said.
“What sort of cleaning needs to be done that would require, this?”
“You won’t know until you start. Do you think this is something you’d like to pursue?”
“A job’s a job, right?”
“You still haven’t answered my question. Would you like to work for the company?”
“Yes,” she said. She needed to work. She needed a job. And prior to this she’d been working in the Industry. Anything was better than that, so long as the pay was good.
Something shifted in the room. It wasn’t the lights, although everything seemed to get darker—darker in the sense the world grew dark just before fainting. But it was also Charlotte’s perception of the world. Her initial view of the receptionist was that she seemed aloof and try-hard with all of her canned responses.
But with a word that had changed. The receptionist looked intimidating, formidable even. Charlotte had gotten into one fight in her entire life. It had happened on-set with another actress who she was supposed to be in a scene with. The fight went down as one might expect, complete with hair-pulling, broken nails and black and blue bloody faces. Needless to say, the scene did not happen and one of them left without a paycheck that day. What Charlotte remembered was the moments before the fight began, the way the girl approached her—not like a person, but a predator. And the moment in which she struck seemed to come out of nowhere. One moment she was standing over Charlotte while she brushed her hair, and the next they were on the floor of that hotel bathroom and all she could think of was that she’d have to brush her hair all over again.
This was how the receptionist looked at her now. And she was moving toward Charlotte, closing in.
She was ready to attack.