Inventory 847

“Yeah, I know. But then he said that he’d cut out everything important I wrote ‘cuz it was ‘unnecessary.’”

“Marty’s kind of a dick that way.”

Jamie was sitting on a big wooden crate in the processing zone, a wide bay of pallets and boxes and shipments strewn all over the place, waiting to be checked and sorted. Tess, a more muscular type with short-cut hair, had pulled up to Northline Depot about ten minutes ago, driving a box truck loaded to filling with ‘random bullshit,’ as they gracefully described it.

“But to be fair,” they said, crowning a final crate atop a carefully-placed grid of 19 others, “I’d probably do the same thing if I were him. It’s a business. Gotta keep the whole toxic magic orb thing on the down-low, y’know?”

Jamie nodded. “I’m not sure if he believes it’s ‘magic,’ if you’d put it that way. Neither does Darrell, or Nora, really. I’m not sure myself, but I can’t help but think they’re just not interested.”

“That’s the thing — people don’t let just one or two things change their ‘rational’ mind. Me, though, I’ve seen a lot of shit like this.”

“Oh come on, Tess. This is different from your weird cryptid theories.”

“They’re not theories. Not if you’ve got proof.”

From experience, she knew Tess’s ‘proof’ largely consisted of a variety of embellished anecdotes, questionable hearsay, and implausible explanations for fairly normal events. Even though their tales were fairly bizarre when compared to the typical ghost encounter or Bigfoot sighting, they were nothing comparable #847. If ‘magic’ — or as Jamie would more accurately describe it, the paranatural — was real, it most likely wasn’t anything like what people believed.

Jamie tapped her foot on the sawdusty floor. “Anyway, you are right about one thing,” she said, standing up. “It’s not enough to just suspect it’s all mysterious. We need to investigate, get hard evidence.”

Tess laughed. “Well, you need to. I have a job. Care to join me?” She gestured to the crate fortress she had built. Jamie took two firm steps back.

“Maybe we’ll divide and conquer,” she said.

It was a large plastic barrel in an ugly standard-model blue. A printed sheet of paper was taped on the side, reading “Object #847,” quote marks included. On the top, a plastic jug was part-way filled with the slime orb’s ooze, which funneled through a small hole cut in the bottom that led into the barrel’s bunghole. This entire bizarre contraption was the product of Nora’s creative mind, Darrell’s resourceful engineering, and Jamie’s physical labor.

There shouldn’t be much of an issue, she thought. I’m not doing anything dangerous.

She had brought the essential scientific instruments — gloves, a cup for taking samples, a bottle of water, and a plastic bag and some paper towels in case of emergency. She even had some truly advanced technology from the maintenance closet — an infrared thermometer, vinegar and soap, and an aluminum tub. And, of course, her phone for googling how science is done. It was a full laboratory that filled her hands to the point of nearly dropping clumsily across the ground.

Jamie reached for the jug, ripped off the duct tape holding it to the barrel, and delicately tipped some of the brownish ooze into the plastic cup. It seeped in, crawling along the edge like vegetable oil before pooling in the bottom.

She pulled out her phone.

Test 1. Mass.

“Okay, database gone,” Marty muttered to himself. “No big deal. Jamie finished retaking the inventory, Nora’s investigating who broke our stuff, and Darrell’s keeping everything else running.” He reached for a tray on the side of his desk, contemplating between blank paper and ruled. He settled on blank, and set a few clean sheets on the table. “Accounting. It’s not that scary. I can do this.”

Nothing was wrong. Nothing is wrong. Northline was doing just fine. They received, what, one or two clients a day? He scribbed down notes with his shitty ballpoint pen, one of many disposables he usually saved for customers. More clients on weekends, of course. The warehouse had maybe two hundred units rented out this month if he recalled right, maybe a bit less actually. A lot of standard units had been rented, but more popular were their premium special-purpose ‘no-questions-asked’ rental plans, which attracted the whole lot of strange people in seedy coats that comprised most of their client base.

Multiplication. Income. His pen ran out of ink. He shook it vigorously, whacked it on the table a few times for good measure, and kept writing. Transport and whatnot services for their equally shady corporate clients brought in a lot of money too. Not to forget the random charges they snuck into their payment plans, and upticks they disguised as discounts. And then all the income from selling shit online, untaxed for now. Marty hit a bunch of digits on a calculator.

“Fuck.” He grabbed another pen from his cup — a red gel pen — and scratched a big ‘X’ over his math homework. He slid the scratch paper under the still blank sheets, and reached for a binder on the shelf behind him.

He leaned back in his mesh swivel chair. Everything was fine.

As faucet water streamed into the cup, the slimy fluid floated high and dry at the top, congealing into a putrid semi-solid goop that appeared undisturbed as the water level rose below it. Jamie turned the tap off in the break room sink.

Test 4, results. Does not mix or dissolve in water. Adding water causes some kind of transformation into a more sticky substance. Possibly an oil?

She vaguely felt the odd scent of the liquid, unsettling but not overpowering. She leaned her nose over the cup. It didn’t have the plant-y scent of canola, or the gross unappetizing odor of olive, or the unrelentingly noxious stench of motor oil. It still smelled like it always had — somewhat like mold or wet cardboard, with the vague odor a bad shit, though not as intense. There was that strange iron-like scent, like the one from tasting a metal spoon — or blood. Blood from a nosebleed, where it trickles down your pharynx into the back of your throat to pool and fester in the esophagus.

Impromptu smell test results. Gross, kind of musty…

Jamie jotted down her observations in her notepad app, and continued her experiments. She adapted, improvised with new procedures: testing for melting point with the microwave and thermometer, chemical acidity using the baking soda, polarity by emptying a coffee machine sugar packet into the fluid to see if it would dissolve. She visited the break room, the office, the maintenance closet, and the parking lot in her quest for scientific knowledge. Each time, she would add to her notes, compiling and editing and revising the observations she’d collected on #847.

Test 19. Exposure to solar rays.

This test was being conducted behind the building, by the crevice where the bulky green dumpsters stood. The outside of the Northline warehouse had that dull gray color of concrete and steel, exactly the same as the other dozens of rectangular industrial buildings it neighbored.

Item number 847 itself was in the aluminum tub, which Jamie placed carefully on the sun-scorched concrete ground. As the heat of afternoon light washed over the side of her face, she watched it do the same to the object. The spongey, black orb seemed to be melting, liquifying like butter in a pan — as it did, it frothed and gushed out its slimy greige liquid like a bursted pipe.

The object seems to be releasing its fluid at a much higher rate when it’s placed in direct sunlight. It might be triggered by an increased light level.

She took observations carefully but quickly, as the object would soon overflow the tub. As she dumped the liquid out into the nearby grass and brought the tub back toward the building, she ran into a familiar face.

“Jamie, what on earth are you doing?”

Marty flipped briskly through the paper records binder, trying not to let his hands sweat, not that he had control over it. He scanned the page like a trained machine and entered some more information on his desktop, before tossing the binder to the side into a pile with three others.

“I should have a bit more data,” he muttered. “Enough to extrapolate.” He didn’t have a lot of time, but it’d be enough for now. Everything was just fine. He scrolled up and down absentmindedly, scanning over his proud work — a spreadsheet, much more organized than he was used to for this job. Headings bolded, values sorted, his minimal knowledge of Excel formulas putting in work. Income: unit rentals, transport services, special considerations, premiums, fees, slimming down via resale. Expenses: utilties, maintenance, wages, insurance, taxes… rent.

It wasn’t a big deal. Just a margin of error — they weren’t perfect estimates. He would eventually need to collate a more detailed spreadsheet, run through his email and checkbooks and accounts and invoices. Still. Nothing was wrong. Not a problem.

After all, they couldn’t actually be sixteen-hundred short.

This past February, Marty recalled, it was a slow month for whatever reason, and Northline Depot hadn’t turned enough revenue. He had to, with shame, email the landlord that they wouldn’t make rent that month. The landlord gave them seven days, and Marty took a loan to pay it off.

In May, the same thing happened, and that time he hadn’t come up with the cash fast enough. Again he pleaded with the landlord. Last time I’ll let you off, he said. I don’t usually hesitate to let go of tenants that aren’t good on time.

He closed his eyes and leaned back, his office chair swiveling slowly back and forth. This would be the third time in a single year. Northline had never been the most profitable during its lifetime, but each month over the past twelve, their costs had gone up and their client base down. No amount of re-calculating could fix that.

Nothing was okay. Nothing was fine.

He opened his eyes, blinked a couple of times. He cracked his neck back and forth, hitting Ctrl + S on the desktop keyboard without focus. His hands were flat on the table, fingers firm, palms with no traces of sweat.

“Hm,” he said to himself out loud, somewhat assuredly. “This, uh, could be an issue.”

Darrell was in the doorway to the building, holding the door open with one boot. He looked Jamie up and down, a scowl forming on his face. Her tub filled with #847’s instantly-identifiable slime, her latex gloves, her phone in one hand and plastic bags hanging from the other.

“Um—.” She tried to think of an alibi.

“It was a rhetorical question, Jamie.” Darrell’s fists were in his pockets. He noticed his teeth were clenching involuntarily. He paused. Deep breaths. He was no man of reckless emotion. “Put the tub down, please. I don’t know or care what you’re doing with eight forty-seven, but it’s gonna have to stop.”

Jamie’s blood was flowing now. “Really,” she bit. “Well, you should care about what I’m doing. While you’re busy telling me to shunt boxes around for no reason, I’m investigating a undiscovered phenomenon. Did you know #847 secretes more when in sunlight?” She grasped the tub tightly with the orb still bobbing inside, bringing it into the shade as she faced right up to Darrell, a whole head shorter than him.

“We— I actually learned something useful. This could be a whole new scientific discovery, or maybe even something para—”

“Stop talking,” he said. “This is unsafe. It’s a breach of the warehouse storage protocol — the one you wrote. It doesn’t matter what you’re ‘investigating,’ because it’s not important, and not in your job description. The safety of this facility — our safety — is the only thing that matters.”

“Seriously, you don’t care?,” Jamie snapped back. “This unexplainable sphere thing is holding us hostage, and you have no interest in figuring out what it is, or how it works? You don’t think we could at least find a better way to store it? If you ask me, my findings make things more safe in the long run—”

“Well, I didn’t ask you—”

“I’m doing research, Darrell. Maybe the only value I have to you is as a grunt, but maybe I can be more than that, a scientist—”

“You’re not a ‘scientist,’ Jamie,” he cut. “You are an intern. You work for me, and for Marty. You’re here getting paid ten an hour to work the floor, and to get things done, and to stay out of sight from clients so you don’t embarrass us.”

Jamie fell silent, backing down. She felt heat under her hoodie, and it wasn’t just the outdoor temperature. She tightened, trying not to flinch.

“Now take the gloves off and put the item back where it belongs. Tess needs help working the processing zone.”

Marty straightened his shirt, and tightened his belt. He wasn’t some fucking pushover — he was a businessman. He had a job: to make deals, to secure contracts, and to bring the company success. He stashed the paper back, shelved the binders, powered off his desktop. There was no time for moping over finances — there was a ship to be kept on the water. And the first step to running a tight ship was to eliminate all the waste.

Marty marched out of his office — the door slamming behind him — crossing over the warehouse floor. His charming smile was on, his chin up, his hands firmly at his trouser pockets.

“Darrell,” he said as he strode into the processing zone. The three employees, his three employees, paused their labors to look up.

“I’m putting these kids to work,” Darrell grunted, “since they won’t do any themselves. What do you need?”

“I need number 847.” Marty looked the foreman in the eyes, the latter raising an eyebrow.

“Why, exactly?”

“I’m calling the HWCA. We’re getting rid of it, forever.”