Between a Bear and a Hard Place(2)

After the interview, her nerves were frazzled and she still wasn’t sure what her job was – but she did have one.

The company paid for everything: movers, two months of a luxury hotel while she found a more permanent living situation. Gave her a voucher for furniture, hell, they even covered the dog bed. It was all very exciting and thrilling and secretive.

She was supposed to work as an assistant to a guy named Eckert, who was the doctor in charge of some kind of drug testing, or maybe it was development – again, not really clear on much of anything.

Cleo flipped back to her feet and clattered over to the bay window that overlooked a small lake. She growled at something, probably a raccoon or a squirrel, and then immediately flopped over and went back to sleep.

House on a lake, more money than I ever thought I’d make, and I’m absolutely bored as shit. Claire took a deep breath, finished her drink, and started mindlessly flipping through channels, not paying a lick of attention to anything piping through the tubes.

Her phone buzzed, letting Claire know that seven-thirty was upon her, and with it, the point at which she had to leave for GlasCorp.

Yep, pre-work wine. Thing is though, it didn’t have any effect on her performance. Of course, even if it did, it wouldn’t much matter, since her “performance” was less about actually doing anything and more about wandering around between different labs and copying stuff down off a clipboard.

She figured at some point, she’d have actual responsibilities and things to do that in some way justified her salary, but she’d been there for a year, and nothing had changed. She showed up when Eckert told her to appear, and did a whole lot of nothing. Well, she had gotten really good at Sudoku, so there was that.

For all the secrecy and the shadows and the feel of living in a History Channel documentary every time she walked through the massive, but nondescript, entrance to GlasCorp HQ, it was an entirely underwhelming place to be.

So far as Claire knew, absolutely nothing secretive, shadowy, or even interesting, really went on. Sure there were a handful of off-limits labs down a very long elevator, but by and large, it was a place as sterile and dull as the interior of her graduate school office.

Every now and then, something strange would happen. Something would be off, or one of her coworkers would clam up when asked a question about a particular project. She knew something was going on in that building – or else why would it be there? – but it was largely so routine and boring that it was hard to keep her imagination alive.

Cleo mewled again, adjusted her position and resumed sleep, blissfully unaware of anything in the entire world.

That really, really must be nice, Claire thought, collecting her keys and checking her soul on the way out the door.

She knew all the rumors – secretive experiments done on rare animals; haunting cloning projects; monstrous attempts to hybridize man and animal – but she’d never seen anything to possibly lead her to believe any of that stuff was real. It was all so plain, so... sterile, the word kept coming up in her mind.

Then again, a lifetime of reading conspiracy rags and watching Mulder and Scully had trained Claire to know that the surest way to hide something is to pretend it doesn’t exist and just get on with life. If that was the case, then GlasCorp was not only the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, it was also the premiere hiding place for... whatever it was they were supposed to be doing.

“Need you here early, Carly,” Eckert texted as she was walking out the door.

“You work for a prick for this long, and he doesn’t even know your name. Guess that’s how you know he’s actually a prick.”

“Heading out the door right now,” she sent back. “Takes about fifteen minutes to get there.”

He never responded. Of course he didn’t, because he never did. She’d get a command, she’d respond, and that was it. And the funny part? She never did anything. There wasn’t a reason in the world she needed to get to the building early. She was going to sit there, like a toad on a log, alternating between staring at her computer and her phone, and counting the minutes. Around midnight, she’d take lunch, which she spent pretending she was going to exercise at the staff gym, but would instead spend staring out a window at the stars.

Absentmindedly, she scratched the birthmark that lay right about where shoulder and chest mixed. When she wore a sufficiently low-cut shirt, just the edge of it was visible. It was doing this lately – itching from time to time – which worried Claire somewhat, since it never had before. Or at least, she didn’t remember it. But as usual, she just shrugged it off and went back to thinking about, well, nothing.