Temporary

By Mike Laughrey

Dean Cronin has been everywhere and done everything, except hold down a regular job. Temp work and entry level positions pay his bills most of the time, or they did until Impossible Day. Now people are flying, reading minds, changing the weather and more - and they're not shy about using any of it. With his newly discovered Power to control the passage of time, Dean has become a target for those who don't care for this new world of heroes and villains. Staying alive, and making rent this month, will take every skill Dean picked up over his long and convoluted employment history.

Fortunately for Dean, that covers a lot of skills - and he's not in this alone. The world is scrambling to adjust to the reality of Powers, and the local super teams are hiring almost anyone who walks in off the street. If Dean can survive independent villain attacks, the bizarre inventions of an eccentric super-technology engineer, and the mood swings of two very opinionated sisters, maybe he can hold down this new job long enough to find out who's striking at heroes from the shadows - and take the fight to them.

But with his track record, he'll have to act very fast...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Laughrey
• Release date: May 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311785541

Mike Laughrey

Mike Laughrey is an author, bibliophile, home workshop tinkerer, and self-proclaimed mad scientist. He writes both fiction and nonfiction, but prefers fictional reference works - nonfictional information that expands the knowledge of a fictional setting. He reads technical how-to and DIY books, military science and history, some high fantasy, and science fiction - good science fiction, not that scaremongering dystopian stuff that predicts a new and uniquely terrible future every other day. According to legend, anyone who can properly pronounce Mike's last name just from reading it is destined to lead the mole people in their conquest of the surface world.

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Temporary

by Mike Laughrey

Copyright 2015 Mike Laughrey

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Daphne for her careful scrutiny of the original manuscript, as well as her relentless enthusiasm for the project as a whole. Thanks are also in order to John for many long and involved socio-political thought experiments that helped shape the setting, and suggesting particularly funny villain names. This book would never have made it off the ground without their help and support.

Dedication

For Rex, Lorene, Pearl, and Orville.

Table of Contents

Chapter One: Help Wanted

Chapter Two: Application

Chapter Three: Interview

Chapter Four: Drug Testing

Chapter Five: Orientation

Chapter Six: Workstation

Chapter Seven: Office Politics

Chapter Eight: Information Technology

Chapter Nine: Reorganization

Chapter Ten: Trust Exercise

Chapter Eleven: Human Resources

Chapter Twelve: Resignation

Chapter Thirteen: Under New Management

Chapter Fourteen: You Can Take This Job And...

Epilogue: Now Hiring

Chapter One: Help Wanted

The dust is blinding me, and makes it hard to breathe even through the mask. Chunks of concrete are breaking away from the cracks, and if my leg was in any condition to allow it, I'd get as far away from that support pillar as possible. In fact, I'd go all the way outside the parking structure and down the street to the Stop-And-Go and get one of those huge 44 oz. sodas, because this dust is ridiculous. Oh, and as long as I'm wishing for unlikely outcomes, I'd like a well-diversified investment portfolio, crowds of hot young female groupies, and the ability to touch my nose with my tongue because I've wanted to do that since I was four.

I'd also like to get out of this alive but that cracking and squealing noise says that's even less likely than the other stuff. I can just about pull myself along with my hands and the other leg until I get to cover under a jacked up pickup truck. Problem is, that would take me deeper into the structure when all I want is to get out. Seeing as how I still don't know where that sniper is, making for the edge of the structure and climbing out before it all collapsed on me wasn't much better. There's also the matter of falling four stories to the street below.

I'll be honest, I'm genuinely surprised at how lucid I am after that tag team of painkillers and epinephrine. All reservations I had about making off with that trauma kit vanished when I got shot. Actually that pickup is looking better all the time. I grab the concrete and pull myself along – the instant my wrecked leg moves and the broken splinters of bone have tissue moving around them, I regret the choice even through the altered state, but I'm already out of cover so the only way out is forward.

No concrete chips fly up around me. The sniper must have lost line of sight, but I'm too doped up to figure out exactly what direction is safe based on that. At the jacked up pickup, the higher axles and wider tires turn from a potential advantage into a real liability – if I'm going to get inside, I need to get up on at least one leg. And I do need to get inside. Great. One spastic, adrenaline fueled chin-up exercise later, I'm about to get the working leg underfoot... sort of... and the windshield shatters. There's no way to get to other cover in time so the only option is to double down.

No keys, seeing as how it's not my truck, but between the drugs and the adrenaline it only takes two punches to shatter the window and unlock it from the inside. The ignition system poses a more problematic obstacle, but I need to wait until I stop screaming to deal with that – pulling my bad leg up and along with me left it to the not so tender mercy of gravity. Even if I knew how to hot-wire a car, my eyes have teared up so much that it's like looking through glasses smeared with Vaseline. I hear a large fragment of concrete collide with the cab and I happen to be looking up when it happens. That means I see the dent form in real time, not after the fact.

Can't ask for better motivation than that. The steering column shield gets beaten to bits and I pull out the wires that probably go to the ignition cylinder. I start jamming them together, with mixed results at best. It takes far too long but the engine finally coughs to life, then dies, then chokes a bit as I try to backtrack to what worked. Although technically I don't need the engine running at this point as much as I just need steering and neutral gear, it'd be a lot faster to drive out than to coast down the ramp.

There's a ringing metallic noise and it occurs to me that the sniper might try to take out the engine block. It coughs to life several adrenaline-prolonged seconds later but that just means it hasn't been hit yet. There's also a ringing noise in my ears but I decide to worry about that if I get out alive. I'm not at all looking forward to shifting myself around and having my bum leg dangling off the seat, to get knocked to and fro as I try to make it to the ground without crashing into something, but the situation is far too hectic for me to have to plan out every move. I need muscle memory now.

It might be the drugs wearing off, or just being used up at an accelerated rate, but as I move my ruined leg, and reach over it with my good one to get the accelerator, it hurts so bad my lungs seem to stop. I risk pulling myself up by the steering wheel and taking a peek – still can't see where the threat is so nothing has changed. I shift the truck into reverse and back all the way across to the vehicles on the other side of the aisle, which get their windows pulverized. In my defense, moving my good leg back to the brake pedal meant bumping into the bad leg again.

Back into drive, and now I had to juggle steering the truck, wiping the tears from my eyes, and staying low enough in the seat to minimize the target I presented. A real rub-your-belly-and-pat-your-head situation, but most people haven't been shot in the leg when they try to do that. I can actually see the other cars and spaces more clearly, through my peripheral vision, than I can the area right in front of me for some reason, but I still manage to make it down the ramp to the second level before one of the tires explodes.

I assume the sniper shot it out – at this point as far as I am concerned the sniper is responsible for everything wrong in the world including global warming and antibiotic resistant bacteria – but that doesn't change the fact that the pickup now wants to spin in circles in the opposite direction that the next ramp lies. Panic finally gets a vote and I slam down on the gas. The truck scrapes along the wall of the next down ramp instead of actually going down it, and plows through two or three vehicles, including an old Volkswagen Bug that I kind of feel bad about for a split second before the truck crashes into, and through, the concrete barrier.

I've only done this hundreds of times before – changing an object's passage of time without changing my own – so it's not one of those cheesy movie or comic book clichés where in a time of crisis a hero pulls a brand new skill out of his ass. That said, I'd never used my Power in any form while tripping balls on morphine. Or falling out of a building. (That one other time I deliberately jumped. There's a difference.) So maybe it comes down to close enough.

The truck slows down and my body slams forward onto the horn, which fills the air with an honestly really creepy Doppler shifted noise. I open the door and try to eyeball the distance; if I jump to early I'm liable to break the other leg, if not my neck, back, or other major body part. Too late and I'll be way too close as the time decelerated truck leaves my field of influence, with all that running a pickup out of the side of a parking structure entails.

I pick my height and jump. It's a pathetic one legged attempt with lousy footing from the door, and when I hit the ground I land in the worst possible way, right on my bad leg. The sensation that results is so high on the pain scale that it comes back around from the other direction and I can feel parts of my nervous system shut down. I have just enough time and mental acuity to see the truck bounce on the one good front tire, the hood crumple from the impact, and for the whole thing to dance its way out into the street, somehow staying upright instead of flipping over and landing upside down, which looked a lot more likely when I was inside.

Then everything goes black.

Chapter Two: Application

My high school guidance counselor was a bit of a bible thumping nut named Mrs. Greene. She put nails in the office walls to hang needlepoint versions of select New Testament scripture. Not in and of itself nutty, but against school policy. Likewise, her concern over students' spiritual welfare lead her to neglect the concerns of their future career plans, which was supposed to at least be in the top five list for that kind of job. She got a lot of parents angry with her unplanned bible lessons and her spontaneous prayer meetings, but only because she was a born-again fundamentalist getting all up in the holy grills of a town that was roughly half Southern Baptist, half Roman Catholic, and which had reached a sort of theological equilibrium. Nobody raised any fuss about the cafeteria serving fish on Fridays but the cafeteria staff weren't tossing out Hallelujah! with every tray.

I didn't dislike her for that, though. I disliked her for her casual disinterest in her job and the overbearing arrogance that she seemed to think her position entitled her to. My dad explained it to me this way when I was five or six: God is Good, ergo to do Good work is to do God's work. And even if it gets a bit fuzzy on the edges, the core idea of doing Good was pretty straightforward – help people out, make people happy, make it easier on people who were having a hard time of it. No need to go lawyering about everything else. (My dad's turn of phrase.) Church was where you went to sing really loud and bad every Sunday, since God was Everywhere. As far as I was concerned everything Mrs. Greene said was bunk... but she got really worked up about it.

Really, really worked up.

Which is indirectly related to why I wasn't in the normal homeroom class, but rather her office one September morning. Every student who has ever been assigned the pointless punitive task of writing lines over and over has tried to assembly line it: One word at a time, vertically, until all the sentences are done. Pointless work given exactly as much effort as it merited. I was in the middle of trying to space out two pencils using a pink eraser and some rubber bands when the door opened; naturally I assumed it was Greene back from the teacher's lounge so I tried to conceal my work-in-progress labor saver under a textbook.

Turns out it was one of the teacher's aides sent to bring me back to homeroom. She didn't offer any information and I was still uncertain if I was in a situation where I could ask a question without putting myself in a bind later. Everyone in homeroom was watching a TV set they sometimes wheeled in to show fifty year old PSAs. By the time I got to an empty seat I realized it wasn't a recording. It was live.

Later, a college instructor would tell me how everybody in his generation could remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard John F Kennedy had been assassinated. I didn't realize it when I saw the towers burn but I was in that kind of situation. When the first one collapsed I heard somebody in the back go Jesus Christ! It was the first thing anyone had said since I had come in the room. When the second tower also collapsed, there were a few more remarks along that line and I think somebody started crying.

For something so clearly etched in my memory, the rest of the day is a blur of people trying to call friends and family, trying to find something, anything on the internet that gave what they saw context, and teachers halfheartedly trying to take everyone's minds off what they'd seen and focus it on lessons instead. I vaguely recall that the president had a state of the union address that night but I don't remember what he said. But I do remember the next day when Mrs. Greene got on her high horse about something – I don't know what, I just tuned her out if she wasn't specifically talking to me at that point – and something she said was the wrong thing to say. Some girl one grade behind me must have taken offense because she hauled back and decked Greene like a damned professional boxer, and screamed something about how she had family in New York.

Crowded hallway, between classes. Dozens of witnesses. Student strikes faculty should be open and shut expulsion. That's not what happened. I turned around, half sprinted to the main office, and said Mrs. Greene just slapped a student! By the time any of the other faculty followed me back, Greene was giving the girl a high pitched holy roller earful and had reduced her assailant to tears – but they were open eyed, angry tears. And when the stories got compared, the vast majority where a variation on my theme.

The replacement they brought in about two months later (some guy with short crew cut hair and a different stupid looking tie each day of the week) wasn't much better, but he was better. There were many students, many cases, and his predecessor did not believe in keeping accurate records. Or, for that matter, keeping any records. For starting from scratch, it was unfair to expect any miracles. I know I didn't.

Interesting fact: When I tell people about that particular episode, more often than not they immediately assume it's about careers and career goals and that I'm blaming that woman (and later her replacement) for not being more successful in my own life. Leaving aside how I was supposed to do the job that she wouldn't without the training and resources that her position theoretically entailed (for starters) that is never why I bring it up. It's a multipurpose allegory that actually happened to me, and most of the time its meaning is pretty clear: Sometimes what is Correct and what is Right are two different animals. The other meanings are also simple: Sometimes the most important lessons you learn are the ones nobody realized they were teaching you; and when something really groundbreaking, world changing, life altering or otherwise unprecedented happens, I tend to lag behind everyone else in finding out about it.

Like April 25, 2007.

Impossible Day was more of a rising crescendo from what people told me later: The woman phasing through the car in Santa Fe, the guy climbing walls in Newark, the UFO reports that turned out to be fliers, levitators, and the apex of high powered jumps. I missed all of that. I had taken a night shift security position and slept through the day up until around six in the evening, and I was not in the habit of tuning into the news on TV, nor did I read a newspaper. Most of my information on world events came from assorted websites and I ordinarily wouldn't check those on the laptop until after I got back home from the pizza place around six or seven the following morning.

So the first I heard of any of the stuff was through 'breaking news' bits on all the stations on the car radio. My night shift routine involved listening to music on the way to work, to wake up and stay that way. That night none of the stations were actually playing music, so I just flipped from one to the other until it occurred to me that something had actually gone very wrong. I finally stopped in the middle of a report on the hospital in Oregon where Patient Zero had been admitted, though of course I didn't know all that until much later.

Then there was the WGN news controversy with Shard. And finally, the cut off signal followed by an endless loop of the emergency broadcast prerecorded message. It probably would have been safer for me to go home, keep an eye on the airwaves and try to contact friends and family, but I had rent to pay, groceries to get, and a fifty dollar per night job making sure nobody broke into Jimmy Jackal's Pizza Palace and vandalized the games, decor, or animatronic hyena mascot.

Jimmy's closes around eight, though sometimes they stay open an hour or so later for big parties. That's typically when I would sign in at the general office, then head to the security station to sign in there and sign off with the day time guard to take over. (There's a lot of signing in security. Nobody mentions it beforehand.) After that it was ten hours of, more often than not, absolutely nothing. The security systems were automated, the cameras compiled the video feeds to a mirrored pair of hard drives in the main office... a human guard was just there to make sure the automation was running and to fulfill legal criteria. I used to bring a radio until I forgot to take it home one morning and it was stolen by the guy working the day shift at the time. (He also stole the wallets of two guys on the kitchen staff, which is why I was taking over for a completely different person that night.)

On the plus side, almost no heavy lifting, no complex technical problems, no real exertion required. Once my body got used to sleeping during the day and being active at night, the hardest part was keeping occupied until the guy who had the morning shift showed up. There was a camera in the office, too, so there was no chance of getting paid for sleeping. That particular night, though, didn't go like the ones that preceded it.

The security office did have a log book for recording incidents of note, which I had rarely had reason to use up until then. A little before midnight (that should have been a red flag) the lights started to malfunction. Like so many business establishments, the lights furthest from the front are left on after closing times so that anybody inside prowling about – such as burglars – will be back lit and have a harder time remaining concealed. While cycling through the cameras, I noticed that the rest of the lights were flickering on, one circuit at a time. I made a note in the security log and by the time I had turned back to the cameras, everything except the kitchen circuit was showing static.

Standard Procedure in this case is to do a manual inspection to determine the functionality of the cameras. Standard for that place anyway. Considering that the entire job boiled down to babysitting cameras, there were no personal tools provided. No portable radio, no nightstick, no pepper spray, nothing like that. In the interest of caution, I took a detour to the janitorial closet and got a can of aerosol cleaner. If nothing else, it would be very bad for the eyes of anybody who tried to start a fight. It's a good thing I did. In the main dining area, there was a twelve year old kid who looked like she'd gotten into a fistfight with a Siberian husky, sitting at the far corner of one of the tables. From the sound of her breathing, she had to run a marathon to get away from that husky.

Jesus, kid. What in God's name happened to you?

It wasn't my best conversation starter, but it was honest. I think I deserve points for that. The kid apparently didn't notice I was there until I spoke because she screamed for about half a second before choking it off with both hands.

Shh! They'll hear you!

At this point, I was still operating on conventional concepts of conventional problems – bullying, sexual abuse by a family member or priest, the after effects of some home invasion. Why I chose the response I did then, I still don't know.

What, these things? They're just machines. They don't get turned on until management gets in around six thirty.

I'm usually more than half decent at understanding and figuring out people, but not that time. The kid, probably because she was still so concerned about the actual source of her problems, did not roll her eyes and make a comment about my intellect. Well, perhaps she might yet have done so that night, if there had been time later for my words to sink in. The National Guard prevented that from coming to pass. It was their only redeeming feature of the evening.

Work in security long enough, even if (perhaps especially if) you only have a handful of incidents, and you tend to become hypersensitive to changes in the environment you watch over. I swear on a stack of Bibles, I could feel the soldiers getting near the door before they actually showed up. I spun on my heel just in time to catch the shadows cross over the glass. I think the kid saw it too because she kicked back the chair she was in and dove under the table. With the vinyl tablecloth and the orientation of the tables parallel to the main door, it was impossible to see anything from a distance.

There were four soldiers in what I now know was nuclear, biological, and chemical hazard gear. Two of them, when they saw me, pointed their guns at me. (I am familiar with the whole weapon terminology / gun thing in the military. I don't care. I'm a civilian, I can call them whatever I damn well please.) I had a sneaking suspicion that when they started talking they were going to railroad the conversation in a direction that lead to me getting shot, so I took the initiative. The fact that there was a young girl who had obviously had the shit kicked out of her hiding under a table also raised a lot of questions, so I was also motivated to stall for time until I found out how those two elements were related.

Jimmy Jackal's Pizza Palace doesn't open for another eight hours. You'll have to come back in the morning.

Don't move! Hands where we can see them! Put down the weapon!

I rolled my eyes, and I opened them extra wide so it was an obvious gesture. No, I'm the security guard. You are the people breaking in. You don't tell me what to do. I tell you to leave and call the police. That's how it works.

I said put down the weapon!

It's a can of window cleaner. I did put it on the table, figuring that the conversation was going to require some give and take, and these guys weren't going to start giving first. You know, if you stayed in school you wouldn't have to resort to a life of crime. You think you're the first guys to come in here at night, trying to make a quick buck? The cash register is right behind that counter. It's empty. They empty it every single night. And there's no safe in the office, before one of you gets the idea of marching me into the office at gunpoint. The bank loves the owners. They make deposits every single day.

They didn't stop pointing their guns at me, but the fact that they hadn't shot me yet actually did tell me a lot. First and foremost was that they were actual soldiers as opposed to the burglars I implied that I thought they were. Soldiers had to follow certain rules, especially the ones about engagement. Then again, the fact that they hadn't shot me yet did not mean they would not shoot me in the future. And seeing as my unwillingness to keep my mouth shut most of the time got me quite a few time outs as a kid, suspensions as a teenager, and expelled from college as an adult, it occurred to me at that moment to try a different approach until the guns were out of the equation again.

The soldier that seemed to be highest ranking lowered his gun and pulled off the gas mask so I could see his face. I think there's been a mistake somewhere. The urge to say Yeah, and I think I know where, was almost overpowering, but I held my tongue for the moment. Everybody take five. You got a phone in that office? Can't raise command on the radios.

Sure thing. Follow me. Can you have your, uh, guys not tear the place apart till we get back? I'm supposed to be guarding the premises so anything that gets damaged comes out of my paycheck.

The guy waved to his men – some sort of military sign language – and they started acting a lot more casual. I waved the guy towards the door to the security office. The instant we were inside I pointed towards the phone. You've got to dial 9 for an outside line. Typical office stuff except Management tried to set the phones up as an intercom.

Appreciate it. The soldier started punching in numbers – while I couldn't tell one rank or unit insignia from another back then, I did recognize the numbers from their tones. It's not really a talent or a skill so much as it is a side effect of working in office environments so many times. I've never met a secretary who can't do it, in fact. Having said that, I did pick it up in my first few weeks at a job that involved calling people up to get them to pay up on credit card debts. (I'm not proud of that one, and I quit as soon as the boss made it clear that as part of the motivational package employees had to pay out of pocket the difference between what they got back and the quotas set for them. I also stole two boxes of copy machine paper, a dozen printer cartridges, and the asshole's office computer hard disk with the debt database on it. Idiot never bothered to back it up as far as I know. Before it failed it held most of my pirated music collection. It's all a rich tapestry.)

At that point I split my attention between the soldier talking into the phone, and the security monitors. They were still just static, so I had no way of knowing if the other three soldiers were tearing the room apart, trying to play the games, or just standing at attention. Though I counted on the amount of noise those activities would make to let me know, the sheer distance and number of doors would muffle anything but the loudest or most high pitched sounds.

'Like a girl's scream?' I thought to myself.

The soldier put the phone back on its cradle and turned to me. No joy. Phones are out too. I knew it was a long shot when I asked.

I shrugged. Didn't lose anything by trying.

Suppose you're right. The guy made a motion of going through his pockets, then threw up his hands. I picked the wrong month to quit smoking. Today's just been one damn thing after another.

You mean that stuff on the radio earlier? Sounded like everyone in the world just lost their minds, I said.

Can't confirm or deny. Military chain of command bullshit. I noticed his choice of words, and his stance also jumped out at my subconscious – I got the impression he was tensing up for something, and trying to speak extra casual in order to mask it. It was actually very subtle, so subtle that I'm not sure that anybody who didn't have close to my level of experience in pushing other people's buttons would have noticed it. Cameras on the blink?

Yeah. At least since last Thursday.

So why did you look at the screens when you first walked in?

"You're going to give me flak about old habits? I didn't bother to suppress the snark at that point, as I recognized from his tone of voice that he had made up his mind about something and was going to push it until he got the answer he wanted. What I needed to do was lead him down a blind alley until he got frustrated, then feign surprise when he let his anger slip. It was a tried and true strategy that had worked on teachers, bosses and coworkers, as long as they weren't drunk at the time. Of course, most of them weren't carrying guns when I used that strategy on them, so I needed to implement some sort of backup plan. I leaned over the desk and turned over the master power switch and the monitors blinked out. I don't know why we don't just turn them off and leave them off if they're just going to use power. Apparently management thinks they'll magically come back if they wish really