The Collection

There were more changes made. The secretaries no longer had to wear masks, and pets were once again allowed in the Steno Pool. Purchasing picked a crippled child for its mascot. Machine Services switched to a mollusk.

The next War would be catered, we said. For the next War we would have hot dogs.

We all laughed.

And then ...

And then things changed.

A questionnaire began making the rounds of the depart­ments. A questionnaire on official black Bereavement sta­tionery. No one would take credit for its authorship, and word of its existence preceded by days its appearance in the Inter-Office Mail. We received the questionnaire on Thurs­day, along with a note to complete it and return it to Person­nel by Friday morning, and we were afraid to disobey.

'If Batman were a fig,' it asked, 'would he still have to shave?'

'If the president was naked and straddling a bench, would his mama's stickers still have thorns?'

The mood in our department grew somber, and there was a general feeling that the questionnaire had something to do with our routing of Accounting. In an indirect way, I was blamed for its existence.

I was pantsed on the day our Xerox access was denied.

I was paddled on the day our Muzak was cut off.

A month passed. Two. Three. There was another execu­tion—a sales executive who failed to meet his quotas—but the uneasy truce remained between departments, and the War did not resume. No battles were fought.

In June, when the Budget was submitted for the New Fiscal Year, we discovered that it contained a major capital outlay for construction of a new Warehouse near the Crema­torium. If the corporation was doing well enough to finance such frivolity, why had we never received our notepads?

Morale was low enough as it was, and I decided that our efforts needed to be rewarded—even if we had to do the re­warding ourselves. With funds liberated from the Safe, we bankrolled a Friday afternoon party. I brought the drinks, Jerry the chips, Meryl supplied the music, and Feena sup­plied the frogs. There was nude table dancing.

It was a hot time in the old office that day, but the party was cut short by Mike from Maintenance. He'd come up to install some coax cable, and when he saw that we were en­joying ourselves on company time, his face clouded over. He stood silently and whipped Kristen hard with a length of cable. She screamed as the connector end bit into the flabby flesh of her buttocks. A drop of blood flew into my highball, and Kristen fell from the desk, clutching her backside.

I turned on Mike. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?'

He pointed a dark stubby finger in my face. I could see the grease under his fingernails. 'This party was not ap­proved.'

'I approved it,' I told him. 'I'm head of the department.'

He grinned at me, but the corners of his mouth did not turn up and it looked more like a grimace. His greasy finger was still pointing at me. 'We're taking you out,' he said. 'This is War.'

It started immediately.

I'd expected some lag time, a reasonable number of days in which attempts could be made to talk, communicate, ne­gotiate. I'd assumed, at the very least, that Maintenance would need time to draw up plans, map out a strategy, but it was clear that they must have been contemplating this for a while.

It began the morning after the party.

The bathroom was booby-trapped and Carl got caught.

I'd always allowed him a little leeway and so didn't im­mediately go looking for him when he did not return from lunch on time. But when an hour passed and Carl still had not shown, I became suspicious. Taking David with me, I ventured into the Hall. My eyes were drawn instantly to the crude white cross painted on the door of the men's room.

And to Carl's head posted on the cleaning cart outside.

David gasped, but I grabbed his arm and drew him for­ward. Carl's head was impaled on the handle of a mop. His eyes had been stapled shut, his mouth Scotch-taped, and Kleenex had been shoved into his ears.

Maintenance.

'Come on!' I quickly pulled David back into the safety of our department. I was worried but tried not to let it show. I had to maintain the illusion of confidence in order to keep up morale, but I realized that Maintenance was the only de­partment allowed unlimited access to every room in the building, the only department whose workers remained in the building at night. Their potential power was incredible.

'What'll we do?' Meryl asked. She was scared, practi­cally shaking.

'Stockpile the weapons,' I told her. I turned to David and Feena. 'Post a watch in the doorways. No one gets in or out without my okay. I don't care who they are.'

They nodded and hurried to carry out my orders, grateful that there was someone to take charge, someone to tell them what to do. I wished at that moment that there was a person to whom I could turn, a person higher up on the hierarchical ladder to whom I could pass the buck, but I had gotten us into this and it was up to me to get us out.

I felt woefully unprepared for such a task. I had been able to plan and pull off the Accounting coup because I'd been dealing with the tunnel-visioned minds of task-oriented number crunchers, but going up against the freewheeling, physical men from Maintenance was quite another matter. These minds were not constrained by the limits of their job descriptions. These were people who were accustomed to working on their own, who were used to dealing with prob­lems individually.

I shut the door, locked it, waited for five o'clock.

In the Whorehouse, the women were getting restless. The number of work orders had dropped, and the lack of trade left them with no department accounts to which they could charge expenses. The women blamed the demise of Ac­counting for their falling fortunes, and tremors against my department and myself moved from the ground up, echoing through the chain of command. The Break Room was de­clared off-limits to us, its entrance guarded by Maintenance men. We could no longer leave our desks to go to the bath­room.

This was Mike's doing.

We found John in the Burster.

Al in the Forms Decollator.

I had not thought either machine capable of performing its function on anything other than paper, but at the foot of the Burster, in a pile that would have been neat were it not for the formlessness of tissue and the liquidity of blood, was the body of John, trimmed neatly and cut into legal-sized squares.

Al's body had been divided into three layers and the parts lay separated in the metal rows designed for tripartite forms.

The rollers were covered with red blood and flecks of white tissue.

It was only the fourth day of hostilities and already we had lost two of our best men. I had not expected things to become so serious so quickly, and I knew that this mis­calculation might cost us our lives.

I spent that morning's Break with Jerry and David. We were Breaking in teams now, going to the Break Room heavily armed. We sat down at a table, facing the door. All three of us knew that we had to hit back hard and fast, and at the very least make a statement with our actions, but we were uncertain as to how we should proceed. Jerry wanted to ambush a custodian, take him out. He thought we should amputate the arms, legs, and penis and send them back to Mike through the Vacuum Tubes or the Inter-Office Mail. David said we should sabotage the Coffee Machine, poison the backup Coffee Maker, and send a memo to all depart­ments except Maintenance to inform them of what was hap­pening.

I thought we should strike at the head, assassinate Mike, and both of them quickly agreed that that would be best.

We returned to our department, alert for snipers in the hall, but something did not seem quite right. I looked past Computer Operations and saw what looked like refracted light from around the corner of the hallway.

From the battle site.

I said nothing, simply pushed Jerry and David into our department and ordered them to close and lock the door. When the door was shut, I continued down the hall, creep­ing slowly across the carpet. I heard the sound of