by an ironic mix of smokers and people who wanted fresh air between work sessions. Blowing his nose and then tossing the tissue into a trash can, he mumbled, “Probably getting that damn virus that’s hitting the rest of the country.”
“You mean the Mud Flu? Yeah, that one sounds like the Black Plague of our generation. What’s it give you? The sniffles? Some crap in your throat? Big deal.”
“Yeah, I guess I don’t know what’s worse. Having the press try to terrify us with a flu or having the Internet make us think there are werewolves in Kansas City.”
“So,” Cole said without mentioning the fact that he’d met those werewolves personally, “you get a new batch of rookies from a career fair at a technical school and I’m out?”
Slipping his hands into his pockets, Jason replied, “We’ve had this discussion before. There’s a place for you here, but only if you can make a genuine commitment to your job.
“I’ve already been knocked down to work for hire,” Cole pointed out. “Now I’m just a consultant?”
“Times are rough. We don’t have the funds to pay a team as well as a bunch of freelancers.”
“But I’ve been with Hammer Strike since the beginning!”
“You’re not here anymore, though. That’s the problem.” Jason sighed in a way that Cole recognized from countless meetings with testers, marketers, or anyone who was either difficult or dense. “You know how we always wondered how companies could keep so much dead weight on the payroll?”
Cole nodded.
“It’s like how I always wondered how a gas station could stay afloat when there was one on every corner,” Jason continued. “Or how so many restaurants could stay in business. When times get tough, those things have to go.”
In his last days as a steady employee at Digital Dreamers, Cole had been relatively healthy for a man in his thirties who rarely did more than try to climb an indoor rock wall on the weekends. Over the past several months, his exercise regimen had expanded to include running for his life with shapeshifters snapping at his legs or swinging a stick with enough force to drive it through a wall. Muscles newly rediscovered and honed through painful hours of sparring tensed beneath his faded plaid shirt. Not only did he want to choke Jason at that moment, but he knew four different ways to do it. “You’re saying I’m dead weight?”
Jason shook his head. “Forget I said dead weight. What I meant was…” Abruptly, Jason straightened his back and lifted his chin. “You left us in a jam, Cole. You were supposed to come back months ago, but you didn’t. I’ve known you forever, so I let it slide. Then you decide to stay in Chicago, but you still want your job here. You’ve given me some great ideas for downloadable Hammer content as well as the start of a new project, so I gave you another chance. We’ve got games to make and I’ve hired plenty of new talent who are willing to actually come here every day and make them.”
Choking back what he originally wanted to say, Cole grumbled, “I know, I know.”
“You’ve got talent as well as experience,” Jason said, “but you can only do so much on your laptop.”
“What about those ideas for that new game with the shapeshifting characters or those new tricks for the Hammer maps?”
“All of that was excellent, Cole. We could take that online and be huge with it. I intended on purchasing the rights from you as soon as possible. Since you’re here, I can issue a check. That is, unless you’d reconsider taking a prime spot on one of our dev teams?”
“You’d put me in charge of development?”
“Upper tier,” Jason clarified. “You’ve been out of the loop too long to be in charge.”
“It’s only been a few months.”
“That’s a long time in this industry. I don’t need to tell you that.” Jason crossed his arms and lowered his chin. That meant business. “You and I can put some real good stuff together, but not through e-mail. Whatever you’re doing in Chicago must be huge to prevent you from accepting the position I offered a while ago. If you came back, it wouldn’t be long before you’d see a raise, a chance to start another project, maybe your own office.”
That last part had been a last minute piece of cheese set onto the trap. Cole could tell as much by Jason’s expectant grin and the subtle angle of his head. But what was he going to tell him? That while he’d been away from his Seattle desk and keyboard, there was a massacre in Janesville, Wisconsin, and an attempted siege in Kansas City, Missouri? Werewolf activity had been down since then, but that wouldn’t last forever. Nymar lived in nearly every city, which wasn’t anything new. Skinners had even worse things to keep them busy, and Paige…
“What about this Paige you’ve been mentioning?” Jason asked. Nodding with the certainty of someone who actually paid attention during conversations, he added, “Is she the one keeping you in Chi-Town?”
“Don’t call it that.”
“Whatever. Is she?”
“The last I heard from her, Paige was headed off to try and hook up with some cop.”
“Does anyone say hook up anymore?” Jason mused.
“Fuck! Is that better? She went to fuck some cop because Lord knows she won’t fucking touch me!”
With Cole’s voice bouncing off the exterior walls, Jason glanced around nervously, as if he expected to be collared by one of his own security guards. “Okay. Calm down. Didn’t mean to touch a nerve.”
As Cole thought back to that conversation, he drove along a stretch of interstate that cut through a quiet section of Minnesota. Stress pushed against the back of his eyeballs and he did his best to alleviate that situation by digging a CD out from a case on the seat next to him. For most of the ride he’d been content to take his chances with local radio stations, but the tension cinching around his guts demanded a very specific kind of music to ease it.
When the first few raging bars of Black Label Society tore through the air, Cole gripped the steering wheel and snarled along with Zakk Wylde. Rather than rip his throat apart trying to compete with the metal legend, he stared at the road and thought about the rest of his visit to Seattle.
“What about Nora?” Jason had asked as he fed a dollar into one of the break room’s soda machines. “She’s still here, you know.”
“Is she waiting for me?”
Jason snickered, stooped down to get his plastic bottle of diet cola and then twisted off the cap. “Yeah. She’s been pining away, knitting your likeness into memorial quilts.”
“Smartass.”
“She asks about you all the time. Hasn’t she been calling?”
“A few times, I guess,” Cole admitted. “Just didn’t seem worth going through the motions since that’s all either of us would be doing.”
“She cares about you,” Jason insisted.
“Sure, in a ‘I hope he’s not dead’ kind of way. For all I know, that’s shifted to something less tolerant.”
“There’s nobody else in Chicago?”
“I did intend on seeing this one woman while I was out and about,” Cole said. “Her name’s Abby.”
“Ah, let’s hear about her.”
“I’ve only seen pictures of her and talked to her a few times on the phone. We’re supposed to meet on my way back to Chicago, but I don’t know.”
“Christ, Cole. Is this some kind of Internet dating thing?”
“No!” Now it was Cole’s turn to glance around nervously. There were plenty of young faces pointed his way, surely chattering back and forth about various reasons why some unshaven, shabbily dressed man with messy hair was talking to one of the biggest executives of the company. “She’s someone I’ve met. That’s all.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“She works for the Midwestern Ectological Group.”
“Ectological? Is that a real word?” Before Cole could fully roll his eyes, Jason snapped his fingers and said, “Wait! You mean those ghost-hunting guys with the cable specials?”
“That’s them.”
“They’ve got a new show coming up about all the werewolf stories and monster sightings in the news. I was going to DVR it. Should be…interesting.”
