CHAPTER 14

“Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.”
-David Byrne
        Once in a Lifetime

The room Atria called her office had a striking resemblance to every interrogation room one might see in numerous episodes of  “Law & Order.” The only big difference being that instead of a two-way mirror, there hung a map of Antarctica with numerous red stick pins in it. There was a metal desk that someone saw fit to spray paint olive green. On it, a low hung fluorescent desk lamp that erratically “tick-ticked,” sat next to an “IN/OUT” basket. The IN slot was piled high. There was nothing in the OUT slot.
     The IN/OUT basket represented to Johnette a sad testament that even in death, you still had paperwork to complete. Johnette sat in a brown metal chair facing Atria behind her desk, thinling to herself, “Welcome to the end of the line.” She brought her laptop, which sat in a water resistant nylon bag perched against the metal chair. After surveying Atria’s office, which didn’t have a computer, or a typewriter, or a pad of post its, Johnette thought that either she was in the presence of a serious power player – or a fucking imbecile.
     “This room may not convey it,” Atria said. “But nothing happens around here without my say so.”
     Fucking imbecile, Johnette decided.
     “You were sent to me because Jackson believes you’re ready to take your life to the next level.”
     “Hmmm,” Johnette said. “Next level implies ‘up.’ I’m not feeling the ‘up’ part of this so much.”
     Atria sighed. Why bother with the pretense. There was a time when she would have. But now? With this angry young thing? There’d be no pleasure to gain from it.            “Jackson Quark sent you to me because he knows you’re the Antarctica mole,” Atria said. “Rather than kill you, he thought you might be of some service in assisting me with…with them.”
     “The being?” Johnette asked, not at all surprised by Atria’s candor.
     Atria studied Johnette for a moment. When Jackson Quark decided to keep people in the dark, he kept them in the dark.
     “You weren’t a very good spy were you?” Atria asked.
     “Terrible at it. I just talked a good game to the Antarctic folks to get me the hell out of Freezerville.”
     “So you know nothing about…The Clan?”
     “The KKK?” Johnette said. “Are you telling me we’ve got a Klan chapter around these parts? Because I’d buy the living dead thing before I bought that one.”
     “No,” Atria said, smiling tightly. “They’ve called themselves many things throughout the ages,” Atria said. “For now – The Clan, with a “C”.”
     “And just who are The Clan?” Johnette asked.
     “They’re a collection of Jumbie, Nzambi, Kimbundu – Zonbi…undead.”
     “Like us?”
     “Like us, only a little bit older,” Atria said. “And in varying degrees of, well, evolution.”
     “Holy shit!” Johnette said. “Y’mean you’ve got some slow moving moaners down there?”
     “Unfortunately.”
     “Oh this I gotta see!”
     Atria found herself amused by Johnette’s enthusiasm to see the undead Cro-mags, as Jackson referred to them, and discovered she was feeling for the first time in a long time a sense of hope about her existence. Perhaps this Johnette might prove to be a welcome distraction after all.
     “You’ll get a chance to meet them all,” Atria said. “And hear from a great many of them.”
     Finally, thought Johnette. Now she could learn what exactly she’s supposed to be doing down here if not rolling out a marketing plan for a new resort hotel. She didn’t make too big a fuss seeing how it was that was caught red handed as the spy from the South Pole. Not that she ever did any spying, still, when Jackson learned of it from a spy of his own, she knew she’d be out of a gig or demoted, or to hear Atria frame it up – killed.
     And now here she was, hundreds of feet underground, taking orders – for the time being- from the oldest job burnout in history. Babysitting a group of throwback undead. Could it get much worse?
     “So our job is to wrangle a few senior citizen undead in an underground bunker?” Johnette said.
     “It’s more than few,” Atria said.
     “How many are we talkin’?
     “Ten thousand, six hundred and forty-two,” Atria said.
     Johnette nodded silently. The soft flow of air conditioning the only sound.
     “Kinda like herding dead cats,” Johnette finally said.
     “Dead hungry cats,” added Atria.
     They both smiled at this.