"What'll we do?" Meryl asked. She was scared, practically shaking.
"Stockpile the weapons," I told her. I turned to David and Feena. "Post a watch in the doorways. No one gets in or out without my okay. I don't care who they are."
They nodded and hurried to carry out my orders, grateful that there was someone to take charge, someone to tell them what to do. I wished at that moment that there was a person to whom I could turn, a person higher up on the hierarchical ladder to whom I could pass the buck, but I had gotten us into this and it was up to me to get us out.
I felt woefully unprepared for such a task. I had been able to plan and pull off the Accounting coup because I'd been dealing with the tunnel-visioned minds of task-oriented number crunchers, but going up against the freewheeling, physical men from Maintenance was quite another matter. These minds were not constrained by the limits of their job descriptions. These were people who were accustomed to working on their own, who were used to dealing with problems individually.
I shut the door, locked it, waited for five o'clock.
In the Whorehouse, the women were getting restless. The number of work orders had dropped, and the lack of trade left them with no department accounts to which they could charge expenses. The women blamed the demise of Accounting for their falling fortunes, and tremors against my department and myself moved from the ground up, echoing through the chain of command. The Break Room was declared off-limits to us, its entrance guarded by Maintenance men. We could no longer leave our desks to go to the bathroom.
This was Mike's doing.
We found John in the Burster.
Al in the Forms Decollator.
I had not thought either machine capable of performing its function on anything other than paper, but at the foot of the Burster, in a pile that would have been neat were it not for the formlessness of tissue and the liquidity of blood, was the body of John, trimmed neatly and cut into legal-sized squares.
Al's body had been divided into three layers and the parts lay separated in the metal rows designed for tripartite forms.
The rollers were covered with red blood and flecks of white tissue.
It was only the fourth day of hostilities and already we had lost two of our best men. I had not expected things to become so serious so quickly, and I knew that this miscalculation might cost us our lives.
I spent that morning's Break with Jerry and David. We were Breaking in teams now, going to the Break Room heavily armed. We sat down at a table, facing the door. All three of us knew that we had to hit back hard and fast, and at the very least make a statement with our actions, but we were uncertain as to how we should proceed. Jerry wanted to ambush a custodian, take him out. He thought we should amputate the arms, legs, and penis and send them back to Mike through the Vacuum Tubes or the Inter-Office Mail. David said we should sabotage the Coffee Machine, poison the backup Coffee Maker, and send a memo to all departments except Maintenance to inform them of what was happening.
I thought we should strike at the head, assassinate Mike, and both of them quickly agreed that that would be best.
We returned to our department, alert for snipers in the hall, but something did not seem quite right. I looked past Computer Operations and saw what looked like refracted light from around the corner of the hallway.
From the battle site.
I said nothing, simply pushed Jerry and David into our department and ordered them to close and lock the door. When the door was shut, I continued down the hall, creeping slowly across the carpet. I heard the sound of clicking calculators, the rustle of paper. I peeked my head around the corner.
Maintenance had been promoted to Accounting.
I stared at the suddenly full department in disbelief. We had brought down the entire Accounting department and had received nothing for our efforts. Maintenance booby-trapped the bathroom and two machines and had been rewarded with a promotion!
Mike, wearing the Three-Piece Suit of the Finance Director, grinned at me from his oversized desk. "See you in Chapter Eleven," he said.
I blinked.
"The company's going down."
I tried to see the CEO, to tell him that things had gotten out of hand. The War was no longer confined merely to intramural battles; a single department was now aggressively pursuing and systematically working toward the total destruction of the Corporation.
But the secretary refused to hear my petition. She drew from her desk a flowchart of the Corporation hierarchy, circled in red the position of my department, and calmly handed the paper to me.
"The CEO sees nobody," she said.
On the Dow, the news was mixed. There were rumors that changes were afoot, but the nature of those changes was clearly not known to Outsiders, and we ended the week in plus territory.
Jerry took out a custodian masquerading as an accountant, cutting off arms, legs, and genitals, tagging them as Fixed Assets and returning them to the Finance Director's office. I probably should have disciplined him for acting without my okay, but, in truth, I was grateful, and I promoted him to division supervisor.
We hung the custodian/accountant scalp above the top of our door, and though it was gone in the morning, our point had been made. Mike knew we were a department to fear.
That afternoon, miniature mines were placed under the carpet in the hallway and electrified gates were installed outside the Accounting offices.
Figures were juggled.
Budgets were slashed.
The Corporation's profit margin plummeted, at least on paper, and though in memo after memo I tried to tell the CEO that those numbers were manufactured by Mike and not to be trusted, he chose to ignore me and instituted a waist-tightening program. Medical benefits were cut, dental benefits eliminated, and several open positions were left unfilled.
A new and virtually incomprehensible complaint process was instituted by Accounting, and immediately afterward paychecks—all paychecks, Corporation-wide—were incorrectly calculated. My paycheck was halved, and under the new guidelines I could not contest the figures for a minimum of six months.
At the bottom of my check, instead of the rubber-stamped signature of the old Finance Director, was a caricatured rainbow-colored stamp of Mike's grinning, ugly face.
I was furious, and I slammed my check down on my desk, ordered David to take a hostage. He nodded, said, "Yes sir," but wouldn't look at me, wouldn't meet my gaze.
I knew he was hiding something. "David," I said.
"Meryl's defected," he told me. "She's transferred over as a clerk."
That was it. That was the last straw. I had taken an awful lot of crap from Mike and his Maintenance accountants, but this time he had gone too far. Ceasefire or no ceasefire, it was time to take up arms.
"War!" I cried.
David stared, blinked, then the corners of his mouth turned upward. He whooped joyfully, grabbed a sharpened pencil. "War!"
The cry was taken up by Feena, Jerry, Kristen, the others. I felt good all of a sudden, the anger and depression of a few moments before having fled in the face of this energizing purpose. This was what we were good at. This was what we were trained for. Full-fledged fighting. Not the guerilla skirmishing in which we'd been forced to participate.
I lifted my ruler. "War!"
"Huh!" they responded. "Good God, ya'll!"
We were ready.
We posted the declaration of renewed hostilities on the Employee Bulletin Board.
Mike responded in kind with a statement signed in blood.
We met in the Warehouse.