That's What They Say

3. Taxi!

Henry was not, by habit, an early riser. He would go to bed at 10:30, but always found himself unable to fall asleep until midnight. When he woke up, he would be overcome by an overwhelming sense of exhaustion, the nearly physical presence of which would force his eyes shut again until a more reasonable hour, such as noon.
However, he had learned from experience that being late for work in this job was an extremely foolish thing to do. The Speaker was a great fan of positive and negative reinforcement, and his methods were very similar to those of scientists testing a gerbil's intelligence. When Henry had showed up fifteen minutes late last year, he was made to do paperwork for 24 continuous hours. The Speaker had added a nice touch: every time Henry did something wrong one bathroom break was subtracted from his total. Henry had, at the time, wondered if this type of punishment was strictly legal. Then again, he was working for a creepy organization that had been around for hundreds of years. Were they really likely to worry about legality?

Obviously Henry did not want to go through the "how long before his bladder explodes?" gamut again, so he had tried his best to be on time in the past year. Of course that meant that he had to get up at five in the morning today, an hour when no sane person should be even semiconscious.
Hypothetically, Henry's alarm clock was programmed to play whatever radio station he set it on. However, it malfunctioned so frequently that he had given up and now just let it play whatever it wanted. Today, it had decided on opera. Toreador from Carmen, to be exact.
"TOREADORA…." suddenly blasted out of the little speakers, making the nightstand the clock was resting on vibrate slightly. Henry winced and reluctantly opened his eyes. The room was blurry without his glasses, but he knew where the clock was.
"L'AMOR L'AMOR…" his fingers skittered across various buttons, looking for "Snooze." He accidentally brushed the volume control, and the finishing strains filled the room and rattled the window panes.
"TOREAAAAADOOOOOORAAA….AAAAAAAA!" the song was abruptly cut off as Henry's seeking fingers found the right button. He sighed in relief, and sat up.
The grey dawn light filtered in through his half-closed blinds and threw odd, latticed shadows around the room. A stray beam of light illuminated Henry's glasses, and he snatched them up.
He only had fifteen minutes to get ready for work, and when he subtracted the eight minutes a shower took, that left him with seven minutes to get dressed, comb his hair, and maybe even eat if he was lucky.
Henry sighed and glanced wistfully at his pillow. It looked ludicrously comfortable. However, he had a job to do. Not a particularly noble or fantastic one, but it was a job nevertheless.

Henry managed to shower and get dressed in under twelve minutes, a new record. When he was done, he dashed to the kitchen and popped a piece of bread in the toaster. When it reappeared, he snatched it and ran out the door to the taxi he had called.
"Drive," he gasped through his mouthful of toast. "Drive like the wind."
The driver turned around and scrutinized him carefully.
"You okay?" he asked suspiciously. This was a legitimate question, since Henry didn't look like the exact picture of sanity. His shirt was on inside-out, and after a half-hearted attempt to comb his hair, he had given up. Wispy strands of chestnut hair stood straight up along the haphazard side-part. The general impression was one of electrocution.
"Just drive, okay?"
Shrugging, the man started the car. "You want to go really fast, then?"
Henry nodded emphatically, causing his glasses to slip a few centimeters down his nose.
The driver looked delighted. "I can go from zero to sixty in two. Wanna see?"
He took Henry's horrified silence for an affirmative, and roared off at a speed that came very close to breaking the sound barrier.
Henry's eyes widened in terror. "You do know this is a residential area, right?" he squeaked.
"Yeah."
"Oh. Um…" Henry wondered if the chance of getting to work on time was worth the accelerated probability of death.
"So," the driver asked conversationally, "Where do you work?"
"I…" Henry paused. "I…uh…read to the blind." This was what he told anyone who asked him about his job. No one was suspicious of someone who read to the blind, he had found.
"That's nice. Must be a real selfless man, then."
"Oh, I wouldn't say that," Henry muttered uncomfortably. "Just doing my job."
He looked at the speedometer and clock respectively. "Say…can you go a bit faster?"
"If you can tip a bit extra," the driver offered.
"Done."
The taxi lurched forward again, and in a matter of moments Henry was at the subway entrance.
"Thank you so much. Here…uh…" he fumbled with his wallet, finally producing the right amount of money.
"See you," the driver called as he sped away, but Henry had already dashed inside to buy his fare card.

In the end, Henry arrived at his destination one minute early, having run all the way there after getting off the subway. When he burst through the door, the three people already in the lobby looked up, then lost interest.
Henry trudged over to the Thursday receptionist, a tiny old woman named Janice. She smiled at him. "Congratulations, Harold."
"It's Henry. And thank you." Henry liked Janice. She was the only person involved in Their affairs that had never showed any interest in killing and/or maiming him.
"I remember your first day here," Janice reminisced. "I lent you five dollars because you forgot your wallet."
"Oh, yeah," Henry recalled. "I still do that, actually."
Janice grinned and pushed a stack of forms at him. "Guess what…more paperwork!"
"Hurrah," Henry said dryly. "What for?"
"Honestly, I have no idea. It's probably just paperwork for the sake of paperwork, you know?"
Henry grimaced. "Sounds like something the Speaker would do, certainly." He grabbed a clipboard from a pile on the table next to the window and sank down into one of the evil office chairs. Like practically everything else in the establishment, the pen that came with the clipboard was tied down securely by a beaded chain. Defeating pen thieves, one step at a time, Henry thought to himself.
He flipped through the papers, utterly failing to make sense of anything they said. Deciding to give his employers the benefit of the doubt, he inscribed his illegible signature on all the appropriate lines.
When he was done, he handed the paperwork to Janice and sat back down.
For once, there were other people in the lobby. To his right, an extraordinarily overdeveloped man was reading a finance magazine. This struck Henry as an odd combination, and he craned over slightly to make sure no other magazine was concealed in the pages. The man gave him a nasty glare. He had muscles in his eyebrows.
Across the room, a woman who bore a strong resemblance to the bag lady Henry had seen outside the subway that morning was knitting something red that may have been a sweater. She was wearing a long, grey coat, the sleeves of which were torn and faded. The lower half of her body was clad in a thick woolen skirt, also grey. She was wearing a black button-down shirt that looked like it had been mangled by something nasty, and she had a long, purple-and green scarf wrapped around her neck. A trailing thread from its end had become entangled in her knitting.
When she saw Henry looking at her, she grinned widely, revealing filed teeth. Henry shuddered internally and looked towards the window.
It had stopped raining, but the sky was still leaden and grey, hanging over the city like a gloomy shroud. Or maybe that was just the smog.
The clanking of wood gradually became audible, and the stern woman Henry recalled from yesterday materialized in the doorway.
She swept a disdainful glance over the room and its occupants, her gaze lingering particularly on the bag lady, who was using her conveniently sharp teeth to bite off a length of yarn.
"Henry Dawson, Mary White, and George Quentin?"
The occupants of the room looked up, then at each other. George Quentin made a face.
With a sinking feeling, Henry realized that the Speaker must want to see all three of them together for something. There was only one reason for this: they were his partners, assigned to work with the stupid new kid. And judging by the ferocious expression plastered across George Quentin's face, Henry would be lucky to escape from this partnership with all his limbs intact.
Mary White, however, winked at him as she stood up, knitting still in hand. As the three filed down the long hallway, she fell into step beside him.
"So, you got promoted, eh?" she asked, nudging him in the ribs with a painfully sharp elbow. As she spoke, the fluorescent lights in the ceiling glinted off the sharpened points of her teeth. It was all Henry could do to stop himself from recoiling, or, for that matter, screaming like a girl and running away down the hall.
"Yes, I did." Henry kept his gaze firmly upon the green wall paneling, although it made him feel queasy.
"Well, well, well! You seem a bit young for that! How old are you?"
"Twenty-five."
"Ha!" she shrieked, making Henry jump. "Cradle robbing, that's what I call it!"
"Oh?" Henry asked, trying to remember how far it was until they reached the office. Forty seconds? Fifty?
"Yep, too young for sure! Why, you don't look as though you could live through one day on the job."
This caught Henry's attention. "Pardon me?"
Mary White grinned at him with a vampire's smile. "Dangerous job, you know! And I bet you don't know how to shoot a gun, even!"
Henry quirked an eyebrow at her. "Should I?" he inquired.
"Of course, what did you think you were going to--" Mary was cut off as they reached the Speaker's office. "Here we are!" she exclaimed. Stepping aside, she said "You first, dear."
"Er...thank you," Henry quavered. He was halfway through the door when George Quentin plowed past him, squishing Henry against the molding. "Watch where you're going, Nancy boy," Quentin snarled.
Henry made a face, and followed his companions into the Speaker's office.