1987- FIRST DAY ON THE JOB
Somewhere in the desert, a lonely exit branched from the interstate into a landscape of shifting sand, saguaros, and open skies. It trailed on for miles past barbed-wire fences and manned security gates and 'NO TRESPASSING' signs and 'NO, REALLY, THIS MEANS YOU' signs. Most people would not make it past the first checkpoint, but the driver of the white van was ushered through one, and then the next, and then the next, flashing his shiny new ID card to the sometimes-skeptical guards, feeling rather important. He was important! He now worked for the SPF- the Supernatural Protection Foundation, unrelated to sunscreen, though his parents had assumed he was traveling to work for some skincare company in the desert when he let them know about it. He had neither the heart nor the clearance to tell them the truth.
The sun reached its peak in the sky and cast the plate metal roof of the sprawling compound in front of him ablaze for a moment. A trick of the light. Pulling into the parking lot, he saw two men in hazmat suits wrangling what looked like a giant, bellowing spider-crab made of black ooze and eyeballs towards a hangar door. It gave him pause about doing this job, but what had he expected? To work at a world-renowned top-secret anomaly containment agency and never see any anomalies? Besides, it looked like the guys had that thing under control-
A jet of orange sludge spat from one of the thing's pupils, burning a deep gash into the parking lot.
He covered his head and ran into the lobby, smacking his ID card against the reader like a marathon runner getting a high five mid-sprint. There was air conditioning, and more importantly, there was no spider-thing spitting acid and shrieking in the language of the dammed, so he took a deep breath and slumped down on one of the couches to regain his bearings. There were no lifestyle magazines on the coffee table. Instead, there were dossiers on anomalous phenomena. This place didn't exactly have the lock-and-key atmosphere he had imagined.
The receptionist, a manilla folder woman holding a cup of coffee in one hand and a romance novel in the other, stepped out of an employee break room and sat down at the front desk. He approached her.
"You the new janitor?" She asked, flipping to the next page of her book.
He handed over his ID with a nod.
"Head to the boss's office. He's gonna wanna see you, sonny."
She gestured dismissively at a map of the compound that stood in the lobby. He nodded again and made his way over to look at it, then started down the third hallway to the left towards the executive wing. This place was like a maze, but it was at least a cool maze, both in temperature and in architectural style.
He arrived in front of a flimsy door beyond which he could hear an argument between two loud and frustrated men.
"Tell them they work for me!" yelled the higher of the two.
"They say no can do-" came a quieter, deeper voice.
"Tell them they'll never get paid for anything ever again if they can't get their sorry selves out here to pick me up! I've got a vacation in Tijuana on the line!"
"I- I'll tell them, sir."
"Yeah, I thought so!"
There were a few beeps from some sort of unfamiliar communications device.
"Sir, they've responded to the message."
"Already? What's it say?"
"It s-says, uh, it says, 'No.'..."
"GET OUT OF MY OFFICE! I'll chew them out about this myself."
The door swung open and sharply nailed the man waiting outside in the head. He groaned and crumpled to the floor as the one to whom the higher voice belonged- an angry toon-shaded unicorn in a suit- pushed the one to whom the lower voice belonged- a frowny purple man of indeterminate species- down the hallway.
"And don't come back unless it's to say the jet folks are on their way!" called the unicorn- the boss?- before turning to the man in a heap on the floor. "Who are you and why were you in the way of my door?"
"I'm- urk, that stings! I'm the new janitor."
The anger never left the boss's eyes, but his mouth smiled unconvincingly.
"Go and clean up the office, then. I'm heading to lunch. Pleasure to have you here with the SPF."
He didn't have any cleaning supplies. He didn't have any instructions. He didn't have the willpower to argue. He trudged into the office and found papers all over the floor, thrown haphazardly from a stack on the table during the fight. At least that was the extent of the damage.
When the boss returned, the brand new janitor stood outside the door and opened it like a butler. He received a more genuine smile this time.
"Finally, somebody who doesn't think he can walk all over me! You'll do just fine here, I think. Oh! Now go clean the containment center- they had a real bad spill, so you'd better get moving if you don't wanna lose your job, capiche?"
The boss took a look at the spotless room and raised his eyebrows in satisfaction, but ultimately didn't say anything before the door was slammed and the janitor was trudging back to the map.
It turned out that the containment center had a separate entrance from the administrative building, so he needed to leave his chilly refuge for the sweltering heat of the surrounding desert. Did the containment center also have air-con? He hoped it did, he desperately hoped it did. Before he left, he took a moment to listen through the door for any unearthly bellowing or acid sizzling. Nothing. The coast was clear, assuming that the thing had no silent mode. He peeked out. Many more gashes lined the lot, some of them deeper than others, one of them cutting right across-
His van! Half of his van was gone! It had melted into a boiling puddle of ooze, a perfect cross-section that laid bare his boxes of personal stuff in the back and a smoking half-engine in the front.
Well, he was supposed to be a live-in janitor, anyway...
2 WEEKS ON THE JOB
The containment center was a lot larger than its exterior gave it credit for. Staring down at a map guide list of the 200 departments that included such colorful names as 'Department of Haunted Carnival Rides' and 'Department of Mental Disorder-Inducing Household Appliances', he wondered if he'd keel over and die before getting the chance to see all of them. So far it had mostly been a few routine spills from the infinite (and infinitely unstable) coffee cup in the Department of Objects With Volumes Larger Than Their Exteriors Would Suggest, a strange concept considering that the entire center was already one of those. He had also cleaned up after several more heated debates in his boss's office.
Today he noticed that there were two work orders in the DOOWVLTTEWS instead of just the usual daily one, and, after clearing the floor of coffee and setting the cup back upright to slowly start filling again, he trundled further into the annals of the department to visit the chamber where his second mess was. The scene in front of him could pass for the world's most depressing car show. In the middle of a grungy cell, lit only by a flickering spotlight that swung from the roof by three wires- only one connected- was a beat-up old red van with a puddle of oil slowly forming under the engine. Anomalous items were almost never name-brand- he considered that if one were to start a business selling them it would probably come off as a bootlegging operation- and this van was no exception, though it bore an uncanny resemblance to the very van he was still mourning.
He cleaned up the oil and moved on.
The next day, he had two work orders again in the exact same two rooms.
2.5 WEEKS ON THE JOB
"A gasket? What on earth could you possibly want a gasket for?"
"I looked under the hood of that van that keeps leaking, and the thing has rusted to heaven and back. If I could replace it-"
"We aren't paying you 500 bucks an hour to look under the hood."
"You aren't paying me 500 bucks an hour at all! I'm barely making above minimum wage!"
The boss tapped his chin with one candy-colored hoof and leaned back in his chair.
"Fine," he said condescendingly, "We'll dock your pay to minimum wage since you'll have less work to do and use the extra dough to buy that gasket."
He couldn't complain. Not to his boss's face, at least.
3 WEEKS ON THE JOB
"Can you believe it? He must have forgotten- that's the only explanation. You think a place like this can't ship in a gasket on command?"
There was no response from the van, but in his head, he felt like it agreed with him about the indignity of the whole situation.
"Yesterday I had to clean the cell of the spider-crab, and it turns out it isn't just their vomit that's acidic. Those hazmat suits are a lot dirtier than they look..."
3.5 WEEKS ON THE JOB
"There you go," he said, slamming the hood closed. "All better."
The van wasn't sentient, or at least it didn't have a face (who knew where the line between sentience and inanimate-ness was, really?), but it had come to be a shoulder he could lean on, even though it didn't have any shoulders either. It was just about his only friend. The boss disliked him, the boss's assistant always moped away before he could get a word in edgewise, the secretary at the front desk wouldn't give him the time of day, and his other coworkers (there weren't many) were always busy. It was his job to enter rooms after they left, not to work alongside them. The van, though, was becoming a passion project for him, and he had it looking quite a bit less decrepit now.
He had always pictured agencies like the SPF as infallible, grandiose companies capable of throwing money and influence around to solve even their most minor problems, but if the condition of quality of life at the base was any indication, that had been a misconception. The food in the cafeteria was cheap. A few containment cell windows were cracked ("We don't pay you to worry about glass that's not on the floor," his boss had said). Half of the lights in any given department were always out. The faucets in the barracks were leaky. Where was all the money going? He wasn't worried, not really, just curious. But he wasn't getting paid to be curious either, so he let the feeling slip away.
4 WEEKS ON THE JOB
That morning, the Persistent Blob in the Department of Annoying But Not Very Intelligent Monsters had broken containment again and was now being held back by several wooden planks where its (shattered) glass was the previous day. The janitor had taken care to do an extra good job of vacuuming up the ooze and disposing of the shards, but that also meant he was about an hour late for lunch, and when he walked in, rather than the usual crowd (no one), he saw a considerable crowd (one person). The crowd was his boss's assistant who he had mentally assigned the moniker, 'purple sad guy'. This could be a chance to figure out what was going on! Sure, he had snuck peeks at documents in the office when he was sent in to clean up, but all of that legalese went over his head.
"Hi, you," he said, trying to make it sound like an affectionate nickname instead of a substitute for calling him Purple Sad Guy to his face.
"Oh, hello there... you."
Purple Sad Guy apparently didn't know his name, either. That was good.
"Ever noticed how the portions are getting smaller lately?"
"They've been small," PSG sighed, "s-since the incident."
The janitor hadn't even probed and he already had an intriguing piece of information to work with!
"Incident? Elaborate."
"I don't think the b-boss wants me talking about it."
The janitor slipped him five bucks.
"We call it the Elmore case," said PSG. "Five months ago, our operatives brought in a haunted mirror from there that showed people's hearts instead of their bodies. Y'know, a good person would see a heart of gold, a b-bad person would see a heart of coal, uh, that kind of thing."
"Department of Morality Detection and Measurement Devices, I presume?"
"Right."
"And there was an incident with this thing?"
"He sued us."
"Who sued us?"
PSG groaned and looked away.
"The mirror."
"You mean you took in a sentient mirror?"
"All mirrors are sentient! Some of them just don't know it yet! But this one, he knew already, and he m-made a big fuss about it, and he sued us for everything we had 'cause we'd falsely detained him, and he got a bunch of other anomalies in on it too. And he won the case. And that's why this company's falling apart."
"Doesn't this place have government funding?"
"That's the other part of this. The court demanded guidelines be put in place about what's an anomaly and what's not for us to get our funding back."
"Yeah?"
"We a-argue about them every other day, but we haven't made any progress. We're running off of saved money. Sooner or later, if we don't come up with the surefire difference between something weird- like a haunted floppy disk- and something normal- like a unicorn in a suit- we're gonna go bankrupt and this whole place will turn into a ghost town."
"What about all the dangerous stuff we got here? What, are we just letting the Persistent Blobs of the world ooze across the desert and destroy civilization?"
"The b-boss has some ideas, but that stuff's classified."
The janitor reached for another five dollars, but he had no other cash on him, so he tried to take back the money he had slipped over minutes earlier so he could 'give' it to PSG again. It didn't work, probably because he was attempting it in plain sight. He cleared his throat, pulled his hands back, and tried to pretend he hadn't done anything- either way, PSG got up and headed for the door without so much as a goodbye.
5 WEEKS ON THE JOB
The office had cracks on the walls, now, and a hole suspiciously shaped like a horn, and after the last few meetings there had been coffee on the floor. The janitor had been able to get the infinite mug to stay upright by propping it up with some putty and the old gasket from the red van, but now he had a new source of spillage to clean up after on an every-other-day basis. He had just finished cleaning up the worst meeting yet when his boss strode in wearing that same old angry look.
"You're fired!" he said in equal parts glee and exasperation. "Show's over! Everybody's fired! This whole place is fired!"
The janitor feigned surprise. He wasn't supposed to know about their financial situation- not that the condition of the place didn't make it obvious. Something came to mind, though.
"How am I s'posed to get home? My van got busted on the first day."
"Huh? What? Oh," the boss made a shooing gesture. "Just take one of the SPFcopters."
The SPFcopters were the Foundation's personal fleet of helicopters. 'Hmm, that sounds fun', thought the janitor, followed shortly by 'Oh wait, I don't know how to fly a helicopter'.
"Why are you staring at me like that?"
"Oh. Just thinking. Specifically, I was thinking, hmm, that sounds fun, and then I was thinking, oh, wait, I don't know how to fly a helicopter."
"Hah! Of course you don't. Of course."
"Do you?"
The boss didn't answer. He focused hard, face turning from a shade of creamy pink to a bright red in exertion, and his horn made a party popper noise as he vanished in a puff of confetti that the janitor quickly went to clean up. Lunchtime had come and gone, but having been released from his responsibilities, he made his way back to the cafeteria and found it in a veritable frenzy. There were a whole seven people there, and five of them were talking at once! He could make out a few words. 'Fired', was one. That made sense. 'Fire'- just another tense. 'Burn'. Burn? Was that a new synonym for letting someone go that he didn't know about?
"I guess you heard about it," said PSG with a smile on his face. The nickname didn't really fit anymore.
"Everybody's fired, eh?"
"Well, that and they're burning the building down at the end of the week," said PSG, walking off with a spring in his step as he was wont to do after delivering an important revelation.
The janitor stood there, mind racing, thinking of the van that he had become so close to. And then the coffee cup he had cleaned up after so many times. And then the Persistent Blob, and then the toaster that could print out pictures of your most cherished memories, and then the clock with human hands instead of clock hands, and then the fridge for emotions, and then the talking ventriloquist dummy, and then the sarcophagus that glowed in the presence of evil. And then every single other anomalous item he had so much glanced at for a second during these five terrible, wonderful weeks. He pictured them all going up in flames.
Six nights later, everyone but the fire crew left. They had set explosives up all around the perimeters of each floor.
It wasn't an issue, though. The janitor's job was to come in after everybody had left and clean up after them. He cleaned the whole place, and he made sure each cell was perfectly spotless and also perfectly empty. He saw each of the 200 departments for himself. That night, when midnight struck, an explosion rattled the desert and fire illuminated the sand for miles around. Nobody saw a little red van- a little red van that was much bigger on the inside, mind you- leaving, and as far as the Supernatural Protection Foundation was concerned, every single piece of anomalous miscellany in the center went up in flames. They never even considered that some of the items might have been burn resistant, and they never would consider that due to the clean ashen landscape that was left behind after the demo crew did their work.
The Foundation's name was quickly forgotten.
FIRST DAY ON THE (NEW) JOB
Elmore was an oddly temperate town for one so close to the desert. The red van pulled up to a shady motel and its driver stepped into the front office.
"I want a room for the night."
"35 bucks," said the proprietor, and the shadowy visitor pulled out a gold bar instead and handed it over.
"Sorry, could you trade this in for cash-"
Just as the proprietor finished his statement, he dropped the gold bar to the floor.
"My whole life," he sniffled, "I've been consumed by greed. I can't believe I never saw it before! Touching that thing touched my heart, my very soul! Tell me, good sir, how can I repay you?"
The shadow man shrugged.
"Gimme a room... and 35 bucks," he said, pushing his luck. The proprietor fiddled with the register and gave him the money, which would have made him feel guilty if he didn't also feel so good. He took the keys to his room. For the last time, he leaned on the hood of the van and spoke to it.
"You and I," he said, "We're business partners now."
The van didn't respond, but it seemed appreciative- something about the way the moonlight reflected in its windshield, probably. That was okay. Maybe it would be able to talk to him someday, but if it didn't, that was alright too. He had a lot of work to do. For now, though, he needed some sleep.