The Office Job: Mandala, #1

By Edward Eidolon

An odd team of assassins hunts their target across the urban sprawl of everyday America. But is this world real, or something more?

After a rough night filled with strange dreams, Gradie just wants to make it through another Friday at the office, but when he finds a mystery gun in his workbag, and he has an unsettling feeling that he's forgotten something of lethal importance.

Paul is an absentee office supervisor by day and a money launderer by night. His life is great, until the heat comes down at work and his psychiatrist starts asking strange questions about his dreams. Paul has some questions of his own. Like, how is he going to get out of here? Who are these maniacs shooting at him? And why does he feel like his life, isn't his life?

The assassin's job should be simple, but when your teammates are just as hazardous as the gunplay, and the target has friends in high places, it'll take more than just skill and luck to see the job done; It'll take something beyond the edge of reality…

Highway shootouts, office building grenade battles, strange doors. The mundane meets the magical in this high-speed dreamlike thriller where nothing is what it seems.

About the series:
Join an unlikely group of friends as they deal out death across realities, wield memories as weapons, and discard identities like shell casings. Journey from bizarre dreamworlds to dusty back offices, through brutal gunfights and interdimensional conspiracies, alongside free spirits and lost souls, in a saga that blends action thrills and surreal fantasy into a mind-bending series that asks, who are you?

 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Edward Eidolon
• Release date: Apr 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215288627

Book preview

Prologue

It was a long way down. Fifty stories of empty air between him and a vaulted semicylindrical skylight. Tempered window glass glittered on the roof, the stairs, the street, reflecting the red-blue lightbars like fae fire for the modern age.

Up here, golden twilight bled across the sky from an hour dead sun. Down there, downtown gathered shadow in the streets and alleys and on the eastern faces of the buildings. Somewhere a helicopter growled. Newscast. They had already lost one police chopper. A smoking husk setting fire to a grass slope between the curved ramps of the mixmaster, its jet fuel burning on six lanes.

Snipers watched him. Swat moved into the lobby below, ant-like. National guard not far behind. Unknowable tier-one operators waiting in the wings after that. His death inescapable. But something else, something more pressing, had chased him up here.

You’ve made your own little world and you think you’re safe in it. There’s no place they can’t get to anymore. That time is over. You can either go down pretending it isn’t, or you can bring some piece of that old world with you into the new. God knows we’re going to need it.

But he had never felt safe. Never felt powerful. Never felt like he was untouchable. He didn’t need to. He had had something better. He had never felt alone.

Until now.

Behind him, the door flew off the hinges and bounced along the carpet. He was already falling when the gun fired, a CQBR M4. He could tell by the sound, but he would have known without hearing it, the same way he knew without looking who fired it.

The round that made it under his back plate was the most painful wound of his existence. It twisted like a knife and stung like hate, burned like betrayal.

Other guns joined in, but they missed or jammed. Useless. He was already dead, a falling corpse too forsaken to stop breathing.

Air rushed over his ears, drowning out everything like the world was screaming. A spotlight flashed up and passed over him, blinding him for a brief moment, a sun-bright star turning everything else to darkness, reminding him of another world. When the city returned, he saw a jagged gap in the vaulted frame rising towards him and the body crumpled in the lobby below. Another fallen Angel.

He pulled the chute and the harness squeezed the wound. The city around him burned and the sound of rushing blood drowned out the wind in his ears. Then the old familiar feeling of flight took his spirit with it, and the pain faded to nothing. He cut right at four hundred feet up, aiming at the black mirror side of a swordblade shaped tower. A lucky spotlight caught him. Doomed him.

He barely heard the gunfire, but the tracers glowed like meteors and cracked like a body on the pavement. They zipped past his head, tore through his canopy, dug into his shoulder, and sliced paracord to nothing. The spotlight held him until he spun and dropped uncontrollably. Defeated by light. Falling into darkness. What kind of Angel?

Black glass rushed by him as he struggled for control and flew over a thin grey sliver of building so close he almost lost his legs to the AC units. As he came out from the side of the black tower, another current sent him spinning again, but not before he saw it.

Alone on a triangle plot of grass, cement pathways, and fountain ponds. Unnatural in an urban biome of glass and steel. Squat corkscrew tower of white stone, made in imitation and celebration of things a thousand years dead. He laughed. It seemed to pull him in, spiral roof coming up to meet him, to catch him, to save him. Another god damned spotlight swept him as he tried to position himself for some kind of landing. He found the flashlight button and trigger on his slung FN F2000 and fired half a mag between his feet. The disc of plastic set in the top of the spiral shattered and wildflower colored stained glass burst beneath it, flowing down his beam into the dark chapel. He fell through the ring without a scrape, as if guided.

The sudden stop pulled the harness so tight on his wound that for a moment the world went black and he floated in a swarm of glowing rainbow fragments while spirits waited out in the dark.

He returned to reality hanging forty feet up in the air, blood running down his leg, flashlights sweeping in through the doorway below, catching bits of colored glass and shell casings on the floor. He got the harness undone with sluggish movements while the beams below grew brighter and boots striking concrete echoed in the conical hall.

Just before he got the last strap off, a spotlight flashed above him, sending a solid column of white past his head and setting the colored circles on fire. The rotary blades roared over his heartbeat and a voice boomed out of a loudspeaker, wordless, barking.

The strap gave. He dropped and his legs pulled in automatically for a para fall. For a moment, he thought he would fall forever. The floor and walls were one plane of darkness beneath a blazing white oval and a scattering of prismatic shapes.

His knees came up with a jolt and his feet crashed through a chair. He rolled hard on the carpet and slammed into a cube-shaped stone altar.

A moment of stillness. Light playing on the walls. The helicopter morphed into a thunderstorm. They broke in with weapons raised, screaming.

Hands! Lemme see your fucking hands! Hands! Drop the rifle!

It’s on a sling, dipshit. But all that came out was a wheeze. They kept on screaming anyway. As if they didn’t want to shoot him. As if they didn’t know the guys on that first chopper.

A voice came in, clear as polished silver, floating over the screaming like real speech over TV dialogue.

It won’t end with this.

That’s what you think. But again, just a wheeze. He grabbed the F2000 with one hand and they shot him thirty times. He watched glowing gunsmoke rise to the disk of light above and disappear.

The Gun

Gradie dreamed of being chased and a gun that refused to fire. As he awoke, the details of the dream faded like vapor, but the fear remained. He told himself it was the fear of being late again, another write-up, another meeting, but it wouldn’t fit. It was the fear of having forgotten something. A revelation given by the dream, slaughtered by the alarm.

Morning broke open as he hit the highway and the sky turned a sweet pinkish-orange, like the strawberry-banana drinks he used to get as a kid, glass bottle shining in the summer sun, dripping condensation like mercury. Thin clouds took on the colors and floated lazily above the grey concrete chopping by. Passing cars reflected the sky on back windows, chrome strips, and side mirrors. He tried to ignore it. There was something about it all that reminded him of the dream, of something forgotten.

He worked at an office park off the highway, in a water-stained cement and glass tower. The little gazebos that had seemed so charming during his interview looked like gargoyles two years later and the bowl-shaped cracked parking lot seemed about to fall through into something unknown. He walked across it, trying not to see, wondering how it would look to him in another two years.

He beeped his ID on the door and the noise found a thousand others in his memory, all singing that he’d be here forever. He rushed past the coffee gargling break room, already smelling of microwaved Styrofoam, into a cubicle maze of white noise and coaxing voices. A clock on the wall said 0801. He dropped his bag next to his desk and clocked in without sitting down.

After a few minutes of daydreaming, he clicked the icon that brought up accounts, like shooting an old friend. The first one had a long history of phone calls to an insurance company with nothing accomplished, each one spent entirely on hold. A small mercy. He opened his bag to pull out his book, a thick paperback fantasy, and locked up like he had touched a live wire.

He went through much of his day, especially at the office, in a series of automatic movements that slipped by unnoticed. (He would park his car at the apartment and be unable to remember anything about the drive home). But now that automata had encountered something unexpected, and froze.

The shape was familiar, but the familiarity was fleeting. Fluorescent light caught a textured matte-black grip and a mirror square of metal.

A handgun. His thoughts became a solid tone, like a piano key held down. He broke out in a full sweat and slumped over in his chair. When he could move, he reached back in, expecting his hand to pass through the gun like a hologram. He wrapped his fingers around it and lifted. It was heavy and real.

What the fuck?

Someone walked down the aisle throwing out good mornings and he closed the bag in a hurry. He pressed his fingers into his palm to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.

He was undeniably awake.

The Diner

What started as a sheet metal taco stand next to an auto shop was now a fully built restaurant, its wide windows covered in fluorescent advertisements for specials that never went away, and a small drive-through window punched into the side. Truckers and office workers sat side by side under humming fluorescent lights, pressed against walls covered in framed newspapers and fake memorabilia. Cheap cooking oil smoked on hash browns, and scents of coffee and bacon floated by in little pockets.

A blonde woman in a navy trench coat sat near the front window, arms folded, legs crossed, coiled like a snake. Her coffee steamed untouched on the table and she watched the door