He didn’t want to tell them. They looked so happy, slapping backs and lighting cigars, that he didn’t feel right telling them that the party had begun prematurely. But, as CEO, he had no choice. Professional buzzkill, that was him. He cleared his throat.
“Gentlemen, we have a problem.”
It appeared they didn’t believe him. Some of them laughed, some of them yelled, “hear, hear!” Some of them ignored him completely.
“Gentlemen,” he tried again. “I’m afraid I speak the truth.”
Slowly, they came around, though they were still accosted by the occasional chuckle.
“I have just gotten off the phone with the focus group. They have some unsettling news.”
“What, did Congress finally pass that damn law?” One of them asked. The law to which he was referring had been a ghost haunting them for some time. Apparently, some parents don’t like feeding their children breakfast cereal which has been proven to be physically addictive. The nerds in Washington had been threatening for years to implement legislation which would once again put an end to such practices. Addictive chemicals being the key to Wake Up! brand cereal’s success, the proposed bill had naturally been a point of worry all around the company.
“No, no,” the CEO assured them. “Nothing so dramatic. You know how much money we spent to reverse the previous law, and how much more we’ve spent keeping them from reinstating it. Do not fear Congress, gentlemen. A bigger pack of whores does not exist this side of the Pacific.”
“Then what is the problem?”
“Have any of you…actually eaten the new cereal?”
Once again, the room erupted in uproarious laughter. Of course, they hadn’t eaten it. It was a more sure-fire recipe for diabetes than injecting cake frosting directly into your pancreas. But he had asked to make a point: none of them understood their product. Not when it came down to it.
When the laughter died down again, the CEO continued. “From everything I’ve heard, it is absolutely delicious. The perfect combination of savory and sweet. It would be addictive, even without our special ingredients.”
“So, what’s the fuckin’ problem? You’re bringing us down here!”
No other way to say it than to just say it. “It cuts the roof of your mouth, gentlemen.”
The three historical artifacts with the strongest hold on the modern world are violence, sex, and coffee. Two of these were a mystery to Gina, but one was going to help her get through the night’s work. The new product was cutting the kids’ mouths, and she and Yasser had been tasked with developing a softening agent. She had never seen anything like this, and she had been chemically concocting magic get out of jail free potions for Wake Up! for going on seven years. Yasser had been here for even longer, and he too was at a loss. They once got a cereal to market off the strength of the anti-diarrheal they got into the recipe at the very last second. There were not two more capable chemists in the entire industry, let alone the company. Their parents admittedly weren’t all that proud of them, but it was undeniable that they had had a significant impact on the entire field. But, six pots and nineteen hours in, nothing they had come up with was working. Or, more accurately, it was all working too well.
“Nobody’s gonna want to eat this slushy mess,” Yasser said, scooping a spoonful of the newly-softened cereal into the air and letting it fall back into the bowl. “We need a weaker softening agent.”
“That’s the weakest solution that would bind chemically. You know that. Anything less, it’s still sharp enough to cut.”
“Well, it’s supposed to ship out next week. That means we have about three more days until we’re either crowned as heroes or kicked out on our asses.”
“Relax,” Gina said. “We’ve been here before. We’ll figure it out. Besides, there’s always the academic world, if this gig falls through.”
“Competing with community college suck-ups for tenure and fifty k a year? No thank you.”
“You worry too much.”
But, despite her attempts at hiding it, Gina was worried, too. Really worried. The suits were incredibly high on this new product, probably because of the reaction they had gotten out of the test children. Yes, the same test children with the bloody and swollen mouths had nonetheless gone absolutely bonkers over the stuff. They scooped heaping helpings into their mouths, even as they were crying out in pain. Yasser had said it was like that movie “Hellraiser,” the one with the inter-dimensional beings who lived in a realm where the lines between pain and pleasure had been blurred, and people subsisted off pure sensation. Gina found it creepy. But the suits could only see dollar signs. Odds were, they would release the damn thing no matter what, but any buffer they could build between them and a bunch of suing mothers would be greatly appreciated. If the company ran into legal troubles, she and Yasser would be the first to go, their healthy salaries the suits’ first counter to the lawyer fees.
A couple hours later, she and Yasser called it quits for the night. Three hours of sleep, coming up, followed by another (hopefully more successful) day.
The solution came to her in a dream. She was at summer camp, standing outside a cabin with a group of friends. Four of the camp counselors, wearing bathrobes and sunglasses, were entertaining the campers with a barbershop quartet version of a New Kids on the Block song. Shady, her favorite of the camp’s horses, cantered over to Gina and, licking peanut butter off her teeth like Mr. Ed, said, “Just spray pain killer on it,” and trotted away.
Gina woke up, very confused. She had never been to summer camp.
“New Kids on the Block,” Yasser said, finishing his third cup of coffee.
“Yeah, but I think you’re missing the point,” Gina said.
“And a horse, one you’ve never met in real life but know to be named Shady, gave you the answer.”
“Yes.”
“And that answer was to spray the cereal with pain killer.”
“Uh-huh.”
Yasser paused. He wasn’t a “things come to you in dreams” kind of person, and he knew Gina wasn’t either. But, what else was he going to do?
“Okay, sure,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
This didn’t mean their work was done, mind you. For this plan to be both practical and cost-effective, they would have to synthesize their own stuff. They couldn’t just put in an order from some medical supplier; that would probably cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and, who knew, it might not even be legal. But they were the best chemists in the biz, dammit, and this was firmly in their wheelhouse.
First problem: pain medication takes time to kick in. Theirs would have to be immediate, or nearly so. First solution: trace amount of local anesthetic, which would numb the roof of the mouth until the pain killer could take effect. Getting the balance correct would be essential, since a numb tongue was antithetical to their cause. They figured it out.
Second problem: uniform coverage. You couldn’t just spray the finished cereal with the stuff and hope every piece got some. You’d inevitably have outliers, and all it took was one sharp nugget to ruin everything. Second solution: create a compound that was activated by and bonded to milk, so that the liquid would take it along on the ride. Milk already tends to coat everything it touches, so that would be another layer of protection they could piggy-back off of. Of course, this meant that the compound was less effective when the kids ate the cereal dry, but Gina figured that anybody who eats dry cereal is probably a sociopath who enjoys pain.
One more day of fiddling around, and they had it. Sent it off to manufacturing and forgot about it. The product hit the shelves two days later, and the events of our story really began.
The news dubbed him “Vanishing Davey.” One moment, he’s sitting at the kitchen table, enjoying his second bowl of breakfast cereal, the next moment he’s gone. His mom was only one room over. Davey didn’t say anything, didn’t cry out, didn’t even get up from his chair. It was like he had dissolved into thin air. Police were working double shifts, but there was absolutely no evidence. Vanishing Davey lived up to his name.
Over the next two months, three more children went missing. It was exactly the same as Davey, in every case: gone from the breakfast table, no sign of any struggle whatsoever.
The new product was a huge success. Never had the CEO seen such an outpouring of desire over one of their cereals. Looking back, it seemed ridiculous that he had been so worried about the bits cutting the children’s mouths. There hadn’t even been a single complaint. I should learn to trust my chemists more, he thought. They had surely earned the formidable bonuses he had awarded them.
He was almost in the clear; the three-month mark was usually when you knew if you were going to run into problems. His celebration was once again a little premature, but two months in, not a single issue? It was a forgone conclusion: he had supplied the Wake Up! brand with its greatest success to date.
She was on vacation. Well deserved, if you asked her. It was hard to recognize, in the lab, focused on work, but her job was incredibly stressful. Each product needed at least one last-minute chemical miracle, and each time, it was treated like an end-of-the-world scenario. Success (and money) made it easier for the mind to forget the anxiety, but the body was not so easily tricked. She was thirty-four, and had already had three ulcers. She had a prescription for Prozac, boosted with her own homemade improvements, but she still got the shakes. A trip to the Rocky Mountains was just what the doctor ordered. Literally. He said that if she didn’t take some time to calm down, she could suffer a heart attack, leaving everyone asking why she was gone so soon. Not wanting that, she took two weeks off.
She got back to her hotel room after one of those massages where they put hot stones on your back, and turned on the TV. Another kid had gone missing. This was number five. It was bizarre. The first four had been from different towns, but this kid wasn’t even in the same country. He was from Denmark. If not for its similarity to the other cases, no one would have seen a connection.
The news story featured photos of the kid’s home, including the breakfast table he was eating at when he was last seen. Gina saw that he had been eating Colonel Crispy, which was no surprise. Whether her and Yasser’s pain killer had had any effect, that cereal had blown up bigger than anyone had expected. There were tables all over the world that looked just like this one, except that they still had children sitting at them.
The reporter began talking about the previous disappearances, the ones from the United States. One little girl from Dallas had been eating her Colonel Crispy in front of the TV before she vanished. That was odd, Gina thought. Two of them had been eating the new product. She wondered if the suits were at work trying to keep these photos off the air. People might start thinking there was a correlation, that giving your kid Colonel Crispy would make her disappear. A silly thought, but one that people would have, to be sure.
It was a popular product. That was all there was to it. People get stabbed while wearing Dockers all the time, but nobody thinks it’s the pants making them a target.
The news story continued. The boy in St. Paul was eating Colonel Crispy and doing his homework after school. Gina’s pulse quickened. That’s three. Still not a valid worry. Little girl in Bangor: Colonel Crispy. Goddammit! Didn’t anyone eat Corn Flakes anymore? Relax, she told herself. Relax. This is you taking your work with you on vacation. You’re being stupid. She took several deep breaths. She was over-reacting. Everything was going to be okay.
But if Vanishing Davey had been eating Colonel Crispy, she was going to lose her fucking mind.
Yasser’s phone had been ringing for twenty seconds before he was awake enough to answer it.
“Hello?” he grumbled. “Gina? What time is it? Aren’t you on vacation?”
“No, I’m at the airport. I need you to come pick me up.”
“Right now?”
“Yes. Right now.”
She was waiting for him at the curb when he arrived at the airport. He rolled down the window and asked where her luggage was.
“I left it in Colorado. Told the hotel I had an emergency. They’ll mail it to me later.”
“Emergency?” Yasser said as she got into the passenger seat. “What kind of emergency?”
“You know about Vanishing Davey?” she asked.
“Yeah. They won’t shut up about it. Now there’s other kids who have gone missing too.”
“I know. It’s our fault.”
“What? How the hell could it possibly be our fault?”
“Did you watch the news story about the most recent disappearance?”
“Yeah. So?”
“They showed pictures from all the kids’ homes. Yasser, every one of them was eating Colonel Crispy when they vanished.”
“What does that tell you? It’s a popular product. Practically every kid in the world is eating it nowadays.”
“Exactly. That’s why we have to get it pulled. More children could be in danger.”
“Slow down, Gina. You’re not making any sense.”
“I know it sounds weird. If I were you, I’d think I had gone crazy, too. But I feel something, Yass. Like I felt after my dream with the horse, I feel sure of this: something we put in our pain killer is making these kids disappear.”
“That is utter nonsense.”
“You know me, Yasser. Do you think I’m crazy?”
“No, of course not.”
“Okay. Do you think I would lie to you?”
“No.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Good. I just need you to take that a little further than usual. Let’s go to the lab. I have an idea.”
“The lab? We don’t have access, this late at night.”
“I know. We’re going to break in and steal the pain killer ingredients.”
“No, we can’t do that! We could get in serious trouble.”
“I could get in trouble. If anything happens, I’ll tell the cops or whoever that I kidnapped you and forced you to take me to the lab.”
Yasser laughed. “You think anyone would believe that story?”
“Yasser, I don’t want you to be upset when I say this, but, while you are one of the greatest chemists in the world, you are plush kidnapping material.”
Yasser sighed. “Yeah, I know.”
“When this is over, we’ll sign you up for a krav maga class or something, but for now, let’s just go to the lab.”
They didn’t really have to break in. They weren’t supposed to be there at night, but their key cards still worked. Gina grabbed the ingredients they had used for the pain killer while Yasser stood watch at the door. Five minutes, in and out, then off the Gina’s house.
“So,” Yasser said, “you think the chemical we made makes people disappear?”
“I don’t pretend to understand it, or to even know why I think it, but yeah.”
“I still say this is stupid. You’re just too stressed. Kids eat our cereal. That’s all.”
“I hope you’re right. And if you are, we’ll wake up tomorrow and laugh at how crazy I am. But if I’m right, we have to do something about it.”
Gina had made a double dose of the pain killer and poured it directly into a glass of milk. If the chemical was the cause of the disappearances, this would be enough to send her to the moon. She sat at her dining room table, looking at the glass.
Yasser cleared his throat. “You don’t have to do this. Just pour it down the drain and we’ll watch some Doctor Who. We can forget all about it.”
“I can’t. I won’t. Maybe nothing will happen, but I have to do this.”
Yasser sighed. He’d been doing that a lot tonight. “All right.”
“All right. Um…I’ll see you tomorrow.” Gina chugged the milk like a champ.
Yasser’s phone had been ringing for twenty seconds before he was awake enough to answer it.
“Hello?” he grumbled. “Gina? What time is it? Aren’t you on vacation?”
“Hello! You have been selected as an instant winner! You have won great prizes, including—”
Yasser hung up. He hated telemarketers. Especially early in the morning. He rolled over and drifted back to sleep, wondering how Gina’s trip to the Rocky Mountains was going.
It sounded like the ringing you get in your ears after a loud noise, but turned up to eleven. She had a migraine, probably from the intense light emanating from the walls. Her pulse was slow, but she was becoming increasingly more nervous. It took her a moment to remember what she had done. The chemical in the milk must have done the trick, whatever trick that was. She had been transported to this bizarre place instantaneously. It was a room of light, about thirty feet by forty feet. There was a door opposite her on the wall. She walked to it, more than a little scared about what she would find on the other side. She opened it and hesitated. This was nuts. This couldn’t be happening. Focus, she told herself. It is happening. And it happened to those kids, too. They were here somewhere, and she had to find them. She stepped through the door, and she was hit with the most intense pain imaginable.
It was like the skin had been flayed from her body, doused in salt, and pummeled with a club being swung by the Incredible Hulk. It faded somewhat after only a few seconds, but it didn’t subside entirely. The physical pain which had gone was replaced by emotional distress. Guilt, sadness, anger. She was in a world of hurt, transported here by her own chemical designs.
The children, she reminded herself. They had come here too, and they were likely less equipped to handle the pain. She looked around, doing her best to ignore what she was experiencing. It wasn’t easy. Pain makes you selfish. But, if properly utilized, it can make you tough. She steeled herself and took notice of her surroundings.
It most closely resembled a cave, though it had the atmosphere of something man-made. A bunker, maybe, carved into the side of a mountain. It was dark, except for a circle of light, roughly three feet in diameter, originating from her body. She walked with care, unsure of what she was going to encounter. She listened for signs of other people, but the air seemed to suck up any noise not within her radius. She would have to find the kids on her own, simply by moving forward.
Yasser was confused. The hotel had no record that Gina had stayed there. But he was sure he called the correct number. He had written it down on the piece of paper and left it by the phone in the lab.
He had called just to see how she was doing. After his weird dream last night, it would be nice to hear her voice.
He had dreamt that she had called him in the middle of the night, claiming that the pain killer they had put in the Colonel Crispy was responsible for the disappearances of those children they kept talking about on the news. That was ridiculous, of course. But the dream had felt so real. He had picked her up from the airport, and from there they had gone to the lab to get the ingredients. Then to Gina’s house, to mix a batch and spike some milk with it. Gina had chugged the glass, and he had woken up. Just a dream. But now, he wasn’t so sure. He went to the cabinet where they kept their ingredients, praying that they would all still be there.
Time made no sense here. She could have just gotten here, or she could have been walking for two days. For as long as she could remember, she had been focusing on an argument she had had with her mother, fifteen years earlier. They had both said some things they regretted, and, though they had made up, it was obvious neither one had ever forgotten. Why does stuff like that happen? Gina wondered. I mean, physical pain, I get. Can’t survive a world where your body can die without it, but emotional pain? What the fuck? What evolutionary advantage was gained from holding on to bad memories? What was the purpose of the thoughts which came to you unheeded at inopportune times, ruining your good mood, halting your emotional momentum? That was the real pain of existence, she decided, since there was no way to treat it. Not really. Gina knew all too well that chemicals existed that could ease your anxiety or help you focus on the positive, but they didn’t work as well as they should. They didn’t cure the problem. What if every injury your body suffered was permanent, no matter how small? No one would live to puberty. But emotional wounds can never fully heal. The best you can hope for is a sort of acceptance, a limp of the soul, a way to get by the best you could, considering. God, being a person hurt so much.
This hate-bunker was fucking with her, opening her mind to negativity she could usually reason away. Focus. The children. Don’t get caught up in yourself, not yet.
When he’s nervous, Yasser’s legs have a life of their own. Before he got hired at Wake Up!, he had worked for a pharmaceutical company, where he had asked specifically to be put on the team working on the restless leg medication. They had done good work, if you overlooked the fact that one of the drug’s side-effects was that it gave the patient a strong urge to gamble. Like, games of chance. It was surreal. But, in what until this morning had been the craziest event of his career, they had actually released the product. Yasser had never taken the restless leg medication, and now, sitting in a chair outside the CEO’s office, it had never been more obvious.
The ingredients were gone. Not all of them, just enough to make a double dose of the pain killer. The exact amount Gina had taken in his dream. Except it wasn’t a dream. He was sure of that now.
“If you want to go back to the lab to wait,” the secretary said for the third time, “I’ll let you know when he’s ready to see you.”
“Did you tell him it’s an emergency?” Yasser demanded.
“Yeah, I said that. But, you and he might have a different definition of the word.”
With a grunt, Yasser bolted out of the chair and pushed open the office doors. The secretary yelled, but he walked in with more confidence than he knew he possessed. In fact, he had always liked that scene in the movies, where the hero decides his time is more valuable than people give him credit for. He had always wanted to play it out in real life.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” The CEO bellowed.
“Gina Anand,” Yasser said. “Is she still on vacation?”
The CEO recognized this buffoon. Yasser something or other, the chemist. Typical science flunky: awkward, cowardly, stupid when it came to anything except science. “I think you have the wrong department, Yasser. I’m the CEO for the entire fucking company. I don’t keep up with who’s on vacation.”
“We saved your ass on the Colonel Crispy release,” Yasser said. “You personally signed our bonus checks. I’d think you would know about her.”
The CEO shook his head. This man was insane. There was no one named Gina Anand in the chemistry department, as far as he knew. And yes, Yasser had saved his ass, and yes, he had signed Yasser’s check.
“Yasser, you’re the only person I would trust with something as big as Colonel Crispy. I don’t know who this Gina person is.”
“Bullshit!” Yasser screamed. “You know her! I’ve worked with her for seven years!”
The CEO pressed a button under his desk. “I’m sorry, Yasser, but I don’t know who you’re talking about. I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Two security guards appeared at the door.
The CEO continued. “You know, a vacation sounds like a good idea. Why don’t you take one? You are incredibly valuable to this company. We need you healthy.”
Yasser stepped closer to the CEO’s desk. The security guards followed him.
“You have to pull Colonel Crispy off the shelves. There’s something in the pain killer we put in it. It makes people disappear. It took those children. It took Gina, too. She followed them to wherever they went, to save them. Maybe she took too much.”
The security guards grabbed Yasser’s arms and pulled him out of the office.
The darkness was receding, step by step. Her radius was widening. She was thankful, at first, but then she saw what the light was illuminating. She had been wrong in her assumption that this place was man-made, but it wasn’t a cave, either. It was alive. The walls heaved with breath every few moments, and puddles of bodily fluids sat stagnant all around her. There were abscesses jutting from the walls and ceiling, and, now that she could hear in greater detail, she recognized the pained wheezing they emitted. It smelled like death and rotten fruit. It was disgusting.
Some minutes later, she found the children. They were sitting in a disjointed circle, facing inward and crying. Gina rushed toward them, calling for Davey. His was the only name she remembered. Davey looked up at her and nodded.
“We have to get out of here,” Gina said. “It’s not safe here.”
The children nodded, but stayed where they were.
Gina tried again. “Come on! Get up and let’s find a way out of here.”
“It’s no use,” one of the girls said. “We can’t leave.”
“Yes, you can. We can. Come on!”
A sickly, phlegm-saturated voice oozed from the shadows and said, “They won’t come with you. You might as well stop trying.”
Gina turned around, looking for the source of the voice. “Who said that? Where the fuck are you?”
The creature emerged from the darkness. It seemed to Gina to be some cross between a praying mantis and a cougar, fur and mandibles coexisting in a savage, unholy union. It was slightly taller than Gina. It was at home here.
Gina turned from the creature and vomited. Then she steeled herself again. The creature wasn’t attacking her, but she had an idea that she was going to have to fight it to get herself and the children out of here. As it turned out, she was wrong.
“It makes too much sense here,” the creature said. “They won’t leave. And neither, I should say, will you.”
“What are you talking about?” Gina demanded. “Are we prisoners?”
“Oh, no, of course not. You are free to go whenever you like.”
“Did you hear that, kids? Let’s go.”
Still, the children remained crouched in their pagan assembly.
The creature spoke again. “There is a familiarity in pain which can be very comforting. No one who comes here is held against their will. In fact, it is their will which holds them to this place. You will find, I think, that you yourself have no reason to return to your home. Your life, where pain arrives out of nothingness and takes you by surprise. We own pain here. It works for us. We sacrifice our lives to it willingly.”
“Don’t listen to him, kids,” Gina said. “Davey, tell them. We can go. We want to go. There’s nothing keeping us here except for us.”
Davey shook his head. Gina was going to have to convince the children to leave this place, even if it meant staying here herself.
A door. She had come here through a door. Maybe they could leave through one as well. She focused on the wall nearest her and began picturing a door, slowly opening to reveal a green pasture. To her surprise, such a door appeared on the wall, as if by magic. She heard a familiar voice calling out to the children.
“Come on, kids!” the voice yelled. “The door’s open, and the weather’s fine!”
Who did that voice belong to? It sounded so familiar, but she couldn’t think of a name.
“It’s okay, kids!” it proclaimed. Gina still couldn’t picture a face to accompany it. Then one of the children, the little boy from Denmark, looked up and showed slight signs of life.
“I do like horses,” he said. “Never ridden one, though.”
Horses? Gina wondered. Then it hit her: Shady. The mysterious horse from her dream. Shady had come to help lure the children out of this den of disease and anger.
“Yes!” Gina yelled. “Everybody loves horses! Now’s your chance.”
The boy from Denmark looked around at his fellow abductees, silently asking their permission to get up and ride the horse. He was rewarded with numerous shrugs and head shakes, mixed signals impossible to decipher. Gina understood that if he got up, if he went to Shady, it would be because he wanted to. His decision, no one else’s. At first, he seemed resolved to remain where he was, to let the horse walk away, to let the door close, locking him in this living nightmare forever. But then, as if acting upon some understanding buried beneath his current mood, he forced himself to stand up. He walked to the door and lunged across the threshold. A brief but potent burst of light haloed the door, and suddenly Gina could see him on the other side, riding Shady, having the time of his life.
“Come on!” he yelled through the passageway. “It’s much better over here!”
At this, one of the little girls got up and shyly shuffled towards the door. The boy from Denmark appeared at the barrier and extended his hand to her. She accepted, and now they were two.
The remaining three children looked at one another. This place fed on their sadness, but children are often masters at looking past it. In one group, they stood up and walked through the door. The last through was Vanishing Davey, who, having been in pain the longest, found it the most difficult to reach for happiness. He turned to Gina and waved. Gina waved back, and when Davey stepped through the door to the pasture, she exhaled. Her job was done. She hunkered down for a long winter’s nap, knowing that it was unlikely that she would ever leave this place.
The creature seemed to understand this. “Children are always hard,” he said. “Sometimes they succumb, but they are stronger than adults. They know so little of the pain which awaits them out there, they cannot see the futility of life. But you know better, don’t you? This place, it makes sense, yes? It hurts you, I can tell, but already you forget what your life outside of here was. Give in to it, Gina. Change is not coming. Change is not necessary. Change is dangerous.”
Gina knew the creature was right. It sucked here, really bad, but what was the point of trying to leave? She was far too smart to fall for some trick, like had happened to the kids. Shady couldn’t talk; she just licked at the peanut butter smeared in her mouth. Nobody but Gina knew what was best for Gina. She belonged here.
No. That was a lie. Some foggy part of her brain told her to get it together. She was too smart for tricks, which was why she needed to get up, right now, and walk through the door. She told herself to trust this feeling, even though it felt stupid and naïve. What’s the worst that could happen? She would be wrong? So, what? If she was wrong, she would just stay here, even more sure of herself than before. But, that foggy part of her brain told her, if she was right…
They were their usual jovial selves, braying laughter at their dirty jokes, shaking hands, congratulating one another for a job well done, money well earned. The CEO looked upon them with sadness, a teacher mourning the lesson which had failed to stick in the students’ minds.
He hadn’t stopped thinking about that chemist, Yasser, and the wild things he had said. Surely, he was being crazy, right? The chemicals in Colonel Crispy couldn’t make you disappear. Preposterous. But, then again, the more he thought about it, the more the CEO thought he did remember someone named Gina. He couldn’t picture her face, but he was starting to believe she existed. Somewhere.
“Gentlemen,” he pronounced. “Colonel Crispy is a monumental success. You should all be proud.”
This earned more grunts in the affirmative from the men seated at the table.
“I propose a toast,” the CEO said, and, with that, the doors to the conference room burst open, and a catering crew entered, carrying multiple trays of milk. Once each man had received his glass, the CEO raised his own and said, “To our ongoing success, and our perpetual happiness.”
He put the glass to his lips and began to drink. He had made Yasser put the stuff in his drink, too. Whatever was about to happen to these men, he would have the same chance.