Inventory 847

Nora Jennings swung the door into the Northline Depot break room, her other hand cradling an open laptop that hid her face. She adjusted her glasses, not looking up.

“Kessler.”

Her boss, Martin Kessler, had his eyes glued to his computer. Tiny ASCII characters crawled around frantically; he clicked furiously as if desperately trying to avoid some imminent catastrophe unfolding on the screen.

“Kessler!”

“Nora! Can’t you see I’m doing work?”

“You’re playing Dwarf Fortress.”

Without responding, he turned back to his game. Nora sighed and rubbed her forehead, looking straight at him. “Marty, the database has been deleted.”

Marty’s head swiveled toward her. “What?!”

“Yeah. When I went to update the sheet earlier this morning, the file folder wasn’t there. I’ve spent the last two hours checking everywhere for the database files, but it’s like there’s no trace of them ever having existed.”

Marty closed his computer with his offhand, still staring at Nora and her laptop.

“Shit. How did that even happen?”

“Well, at first I thought it was a system error, but the files were completely backed up. Those are missing too. I think someone deliberately—”

Marty raised his hand, cutting her off. “I’m actually not a tech person. You figure it out.” He grabbed the pager from his belt, pressing the button on the side. “Intern to break room.”

“Intern? How is Jamie gonna—”

“I’ll take care of it. Go fix the whatever.”

Jamie Garcia was mopping the bathroom floor as slowly and laboriously as possible when her pager buzzed.

“Oh, thank god.”

In the second it took for the mop to clatter to the floor, she was already at the break room door entering the key code. 1-1-1-1. Set by Marty, of course.

“So, do I get an early break?”

Marty didn’t have the usual smirk that Jamie was expecting. He was alone, pacing around the shabby table in the center where his closed laptop and various bags were scattered about. In his right hand was a clipboard.

“Oh, I’m in for more work.”

“Yeah.” He handed the clipboard to her with both hands. “You’re taking inventory. Whole floor.”

“The whole floor? All twenty-one aisles? Why?”

“Database got deleted.”

“What? How? Did you press something?”

“Long story. Actually, not that long, I just don’t feel like telling it. Go ask Darrell if you need help.” He went back to pacing, his mind seemingly having already departed the conversation.

Jamie pushed the door open, mumbling. “Yeah, if I need help being bossed around.”

Sometimes Jamie wished that more than six people worked at Northline Depot — and given that one of them was Marty, it seemed inevitable that she would get the brunt of the hard work. On the warehouse floor, ten-foot metal bays towered above her, intimidating not only in size but by the amount of labor each one held. The air was hot, dry, and vaguely sticky, filled with the chemical scent of cardboard and detergent. She suddenly regretted being so eager to get off bathroom duty.

Northline was in the storage business — everything from people’s dishwashers and furniture to companies’ useless equipment and off-season stock came to the warehouse to collect dust until their owners remembered their existence. On the clipboard were dozens of sheets for Jamie to fill out: item, bay, location, owner, date registered, times a thousand. Luckily, all that information was on the label stuck to each box, so the database could be recovered in time. Unluckily, Marty was too cheap to get a barcode scanner, so she had to squint and copy it all down by hand.

Most items in storage were in the same kind of gray plastic crate, interrupted by the occasional red or beige at random. A few were in cardboard boxes sealed with packaging tape, while the most valuable were stored in an aluminum bin with a lock on it. Still, despite Northline’s rather low-cost, low-maintenance approach to secure long-term storage, Jamie found that enough people had decided it would be a cheap avenue to abandon their personal property without really getting rid of it. Scanning over each label with her eyes, she scribbled down every item hidden away in its box, filling in its lost story within her mind. A long outdated washing machine, stored by its owner three years ago when a newer model came out. A collection of vintage comic books, kept protected from the acidic air by an airtight plastic case. Off-season promotional soda to be sold at a nearby corner store come fall. Someone’s old textbooks from when they were in college, too sentimental to just give away. Going through each bay was like traveling through a time machine, one powered by paperwork and manual labor.

Two hours, a brief lunch break, two more hours, and sixteen aisles later, the excitement of indexing people’s old junk was losing its novelty. Jamie was sweating from the dry heat of the air, with stickiness under her chest and in her armpits. She vaguely wished she had worn a shirt under her cheap yellow hoodie, as she now was suffocating to death in it. Her brain was swamped with products, names, quantities, numbers, words, a sea of data that dulled her gray cells. Shuffling along aisle 17 like a zombie, habitually translating labels into indexes, her trance was suddenly broken.

“What the hell…”

It was a tragic mess, even by Northline’s standards of organization. A daunting heap of boxes, crates, and loose-litter items leaned against the concrete wall, covered conspicuously in dust and cobwebs. It loomed, taunting Jamie with a surprise extra forty-or-so heavy things to lift, as if it couldn’t already get more mind-numbingly tedious.

“Huh, fuck me.”

She briefly contemplated pretending like she hadn’t seen the ugly behemoth, or ignoring it under the rationale that it wasn’t her mess — but if she slacked off now, there’d be at least three people pissed at her later, and more if this old crap actually belonged to someone. Heaving a sigh, she set the clipboard and pen on one of the racks and got to work.

The cardboard box at the apex of the pile was coated in a thick layer of gray dust. As Jamie lifted it off the heap, its contents tumbled inside. Thunk thunk. Bottles of detergent. She turned it over to read the label, which confirmed her guess. It was automatic at this point, recognizing exactly what was in a box before even reading. Some of the other boxes rattled from within, while still more shuffled or jingled. She would pick up, listen, read, write. Then repeat. As she filled each row, leaving a quick “other” for location, Jamie subconsciously realized that these were a collection of much stranger items, more so than the mundane objects with invented backstories that filled the bays. Invoice documents, seven years old, from a company that no longer existed. Twenty-six cassette tapes, recorded sometime in the ’80s. Old family photos, the owner’s name suffixed with “deceased.”

Curiously, most of these were registered an unusually long time ago, in the range of three or more years old — which over time would rack up thousands in rent for what seemed like mysterious but monetarily worthless attic junk. Northline, in comparison, was a fairly new company, founded maybe five-ish years ago by Jamie’s memory of the break room placards, which didn’t help to answer any questions. As she worked her way down the pile, the dates got progressively older, and the items even more bizarre. Four hundred empty bottles of “Raspberry Rush” prebiotic soda, never filled or sold — who would need this in storage? She wondered if Marty or Darrell knew where this stuff came from.

Twenty, maybe thirty minutes later, at the bottom of the now-vanquished heap — beside it an equally-sized, even more obtrusive heap of now indexed items — was a box, small and cardboard. It was faded, yellowish-brown, with worn sides and edges. Jamie knelt down to lift it up, but nearly dropped it upon realizing how unusually heavy it was; despite its appearance, it was as dense as a bowling ball and seemed just as eager to drop right to the ground.

She heaved it up with both hands to a shoulder-height rack beside her to take a look. As she turned it around to read the label, and around some more, until she had seen all six faces, she realized there was no label. Not only that, but no print anywhere, nor holes or staples or even packaging tape. It was smooth and blank on all sides, the only marks being the creases and tears from years of wear. Finally, on the back, she noticed something — the phrase “#847,” scrawled in black permanent marker.

Number 847. Of what?

“Shit.” Jamie wiped her forehead. “Maybe it’s time I take fifteen.”

Marty was still in the break room, typing intensely. As Jamie came in, she wasn’t quite sure whether he was still gaming or had finally sat down to help out with the database.

“You been workin’ hard, or—”

“Hardly working, yeah, yeah. Definitely the first one.” She collapsed into one of the three chairs scattered around the table. For a moment, the room was silent, the only sound being the intermittent clacking of Marty’s keyboard.

“You’ve worked here the longest, right?”

“Yep, since we got started.” Marty didn’t bother looking up from his keyboard.

“So I guess you’ve been around since all that old crap in aisle 17 started piling up.”

“Hm?”

“A big pile, forty-something boxes, mostly filled with junk from like five years ago. I put it in the index, but—” It briefly struck her that she would most likely be given the task of taking every box she had just gone through and moving it to its correct location. Nonetheless, she decided to tell Marty her story. She explained how she had found the box at the bottom of the pile, and its strange and unusual properties — the age, the weight, the lack of any labels or packaging. Marty didn’t respond, continuing to click and clack with his eyes on the computer. Jamie felt like she was talking to a wall, but she continued anyway.

“The only marking it had was the number 847, written in Sharpie by someone with sucky handwriting.”

Marty turned to her blankly. “The number 847, huh?” Finally, he sighed and shut his laptop. “Alright, if it’s that important then bring it here. Use the cart if you can’t lift it.”

A couple minutes later, Jamie was back, straining with the weight of the box in her arms. Nora was back in the break room, frustratedly attempting to get through to Marty.

“So you’re saying it’s a virus.”

“Kessler, that’s not what a virus does—”

Jamie slammed the box down on the table, causing the whole thing to rattle on its legs. “My arms hurt,” she groaned.

Marty looked over. “Well, cut her open.” He turned back to Nora, continuing to misunderstand the basics of computer software. Jamie grabbed a box cutter from her pocket, held it over the middle of the box where the seam would normally be, and sliced it open in one clean stroke.

FWOOM. From the cut, dark sludge sprayed out of the box like a geyser, tearing the top open and splashing uncontrollably all over the room. Jamie shrieked. Marty screamed and recoiled, covering his face. Nora reflexively ducked under the table. After the spray died down, the table, walls, floor, Marty’s hands, and Jamie’s face were covered in a brownish-gray watery liquid.

“EWWW! What the fuck?!” Jamie cried, running to the sink to wash her face.

“What the hell, Jamie?! What is this?” Marty shouted.

Nora, unscathed, was marked with unmistakable horror and shock on her face. After the three yelled at each other and the former two hastily wiped themselves off, they took in the colossal mess.

“Man, my shirt is ruined,” Marty mused. The box was overflowing with the strange, shit-colored water, which was slowly spilling all over the table and floor with the viscosity of vegetable oil and the odor of mold. The whole room smelled of slimy, wet cardboard, with a faint, metallic scent like blood.

“Jamie,” Nora said, just barely cloaking her anger, “where in God’s name did you find this?”

Jamie was breathing hard. Her shirt was stained everywhere, in the same color that now coated the walls. “Aisle 17,” she wheezed, “bottom of a giant pile of boxes.”

“Go outside and dump this shit out right now,” Marty snapped.

“No way. I’m not touching it.”

“Kessler, unless you want a trail of disgusting toilet water to spill through the whole building, I’m also vetoing this idea,” Nora said.

“Fine then,” he grunted, “I’ll do it.” He rolled up his sleeves, stood up, and lifted the box with both hands. He then promptly took it over to the sink and dumped it all down.

“You’re awful,” Nora retched.

As Marty walked off, there was the sound of liquid sloshing and swirling down the drain, as well as something squishy and plastic-sounding hitting the basin. Out of some kind of morbid curiosity, Jamie approached the sink, her shoes splashing on the soaking floor, and peered inside. It was an orb, about the size of a tennis ball, black and porous in texture, that rested in the drain hole.

“Hey, uh, guys — there’s some weird orb in here. It’s oozing out the gross slime water stuff, and now it’s building up in the sink.”

“It’s not going down the drain?” Nora fidgeted with her glasses.

“Maybe it’s clogged, who gives a shit.” Marty was hovering by the door. His hand was on the knob, but he seemed to be straining to keep his eyes even and his mouth relaxed.

“No, there’s a little black ball thing that’s oozing out this… stuff. The sink is filling faster than the liquid goes down.” Jamie stared at the ball, silently for a moment. A mysterious, repulsive ball of… something, exuding nasty shit-water from its surface seemingly from nowhere. Her disgust gave way to curiosity — with the rate it was producing liquid, it clearly wasn’t a dirty sponge or something that leeches out fluid. That being said, she still couldn’t come up with a real explanation for what it was.

“It had probably been in that box for years,” she said, “if not decades. Someone must’ve put it in there to keep the liquid from getting everywhere, and the built-up pressure caused it to explode.”

“Great theory, kid. Now get cleaning.” Marty turned the handle. “We will figure this out. But as long as that sink can delay the water building up, I want my break room tidy and slime-free. The sponge and paper towels are in the closet.”