A wisp of an almost-there smile ghosted his surly features. Pressing the off button on the monitor, he slowly rolled his chair back and propped his feet up on his desk. Leaning back, he folded his arms behind his head and closed his eyes in bliss. He hadn’t taken a real break in millennia. He was due for a fiver.
The Bean Counters
The Accounting Department of HADES International took up the entire second basement floor of the imposing black marble edifice that Roger had led them into. Directly above Accounting, on B1, stood the Acquisitions and Human Resources division. And on the first floor, was the lobby. Everything above the lobby, all thirty-nine floors, was nothing but storage for the endless rows of humming computer servers and six-foot tall cabinets filled with overstuffed file folders.
Arlo and Gillian followed Roger through the lobby, across the blindingly reflective red glass tile floor to the elevator doors on the back wall. Arlo felt a brief moment of panic when Roger hit the call button for the elevator, convinced that a portal would open up to reveal the mouth of madness and they’d all be swallowed whole for their cheek. But when the doors slid silently open, there was no maniacally moaning maw or gullet to Gehenna. Just a carpeted box with universally calming soft jazz pumping from invisible speakers and a row of little round glowing buttons. An elevator. No more. No less.
They rode the elevator down into the bowels of the building. The basement levels were not what you might imagine. No concrete pillars or particle board walls. No sputtering halogens and industrial grade flooring. The basements of Hades Corp were completely coated in butter yellow Italian granite with elaborately carved brass fixtures. Very neoclassical. The whole affair gave off a Tuscan vibe, complete with what appeared to be arched picture windows on the walls, overlooking fields of blood red poppies and sunflowers. But that would be impossible, because they were now two floors underground.
Arlo was only slightly curious of the fact that there didn’t seem to be any supporting columns for the massive building above them. Quite the feat of engineering. The whole floor seemed to be one long, wide hall with a single arched door at the very end. As they got closer, he could see a sign beside the door with words printed in ornate gold letters:
The Bean Room
“This is it,” Roger said.
The trio stood silently before the sign for a long moment before Roger mustered the nerve to turn the knob. As the ornate wooden door opened on well-oiled hinges, the quiet of the hall around them was obliterated by a confusing mix of shrieks and thumps coming from the room beyond the door.
Arlo wasn’t sure that he should trust his eyes. They’d fooled him before, and the scene before them didn’t look like it could possibly be real.
An angry ape jumped up and down on an office chair, smashing the buttons on his adding machine. A seemingly endless stream of NCR paper fell to the floor in a reel, hundreds of feet long. Beside him, a baboon in a baseball hat and baby blue leisure suit shoveled piles of dried pinto beans into his mouth and spit them across the room to land in an enormous slimy pile. Half a dozen apes sat in a semi-circle around the pile, sorting the beans into buckets that were carried god only knew where by monkeys that scurried from the room as Arlo, Roger and Gillian watched in frozen fascination.
“What the…” Arlo trailed off.
Roger pointed at the ape in the office chair behind a beautiful antique desk.
“That’s Clancy. He’s got a real knack for numbers.”
“Clearly,” Gillian said sarcastically.
“I used to work with him in Acquisitions,” Roger said.
Gillian just stared at Roger. He could have grown an extra head out of the side of his neck and this whole situation wouldn’t have seemed any stranger than it did right now.
“It’s a Mad House!” Arlo shouted in a decent impression of Charlton Heston.
“Clancy!” Roger called cheerfully to the screaming simian hopping up and down on his chair. “Hey, Clancy! It’s me. Roger. Remember me, pal?”
Gillian and Arlo exchanged a look.
“We just had some questions we’d like to ask you.”
“Umm, Roger…” Arlo said.
The ape was baring his teeth angrily, fists pounding and head shaking in an obvious sign of anger.
“Now, Clancy,” Roger said, “Is that any way to greet an old friend?”
Gillian nudged Arlo’s side. He turned to see her nodding her head in the direction of a stack of filing cabinets along the wall behind them.
As Roger stepped forward with arms spread, appealing to Clancy’s sense of friendship, Arlo and Gillian used the distraction to sneak over to the cabinets.
“What are we looking for?” Arlo whispered.
“Our files,” she said. “Look for anything with your last name.”
One tall multi-drawer cabinet labeled with gilded ‘F’s stood right in front of them. Gillian pulled out a drawer and scanned the tiny white labels on the hundreds of manila folders inside. Flip… Flira… Flisk… She shoved the drawer closed and pulled out another one closer to the floor. Franklin… That looked more promising. Arlo crowded close beside her as she searched for Frost.
They didn’t turn around to look when the screeching increased and Roger’s quiet words of friendship changed to concerned pleas.
“Check the Bs,” Gillian hissed at Arlo when his head leaning over the open drawer bumped against her forehead.
“Oh, yeah,” he said with a nervous laugh.
Gillian ground her teeth and dug faster through the folders.
“Here it is,” she whispered triumphantly. Pulling the folder from the drawer, she opened it and quickly scanned the first page.
“Ooh, mine too,” Arlo said from a few feet away.
Gillian barely registered the sound of Arlo snapping photos with his smartphone. The first page in the folder had a faded color photograph of her stapled to the top left corner. It looked like one of her old high school photos. The
