Clickers vs Zombies (6 page)

“Okay, we’re on the other side of the island now,” Melissa said. She was standing on a rocky outcrop and turned to Cathy. Wendy Snow, her co-worker and chief confidant, was standing beside her. Both women had been put on Melissa’s team in what was obviously a concerted effort by Jim to foster a stronger team unity among the three women. All the other teams had been broken up with different employees from different departments.
It must be really obvious that we don’t work well together
, Cathy thought.

“Yes, we’re on the other side of the island,” Wendy said. She glanced at Cathy and shrugged.

“So now what?” Melissa asked.

“We join hands and sing kumbaya?” Cathy suggested.

Melissa frowned. Her brown hair blew in her face from the offshore wind. They had hiked down to this section of the island per the consultant’s directions and diagram on the chart he’d provided to them. He’d divided all twenty employees of Sunn Advertising into groups and scattered them in all directions on the island with the instructions that once they reached their destination they were to observe their surroundings, take stock of the people they were with, assess the situation and act accordingly. “It doesn’t matter what it is,” he’d said, strolling before them in the park on Lime Street where they’d started their day. The consultant was a man in his mid-thirties with an open, sunny disposition, brown hair, blue eyes, giving Cathy the impression he was a typical Southern California native. He’d introduced himself as John. “Some of you may end up at the strand. There might be a lot of kids playing, there might be an ice cream stand, a hot dog vendor, people throwing Frisbees with their dogs. What will you do as a group? Have a picnic in the park? Get ice cream? Start your own game of Frisbee? You will need to make this decision as a team. Another group of you may end up outside a shopping mall with a food court. Do you decide to go shopping? Do you get lunch? If there’s a jogging path near the mall, do you decide to go jogging? Again, you must make a decision on one activity based on your surroundings and you must come to this decision as a team.”

And on and on it had went. John had tossed out half a dozen other possible scenarios based on the environment they might wind up in. As a group, they were supposed to decide what to do and arrive at that conclusion by working together with minimal arguments. He’d held a football in his hands. “After all,” John had said, “this exercise is all about how you react naturally to the things around you. This isn’t about ladder climbing or jockeying for position to attain another notch in your belt. This is about working together toward a common goal.” Then with a smooth, practiced move, he’d tossed the football at one of the half dozen groups he’d paired off. One of the graphic artists, Andy Saunders, caught the ball, but barely.

“Why’d you catch that ball, Andy?” John had asked.

“Because you threw it toward me,” Andy responded.

“Is there another reason why you caught it?”

Andy had shrugged. “Well, yeah…if I hadn’t caught it, it would’ve hit me.”

“True. It might have bounced off you and hit somebody else in your group, too. Correct?”

There’d been a small chuckle of amusement from Andy’s group. Andy grinned sheepishly as he regarded his team mates. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“By reacting instinctively to that situation, you not only prevented this football from bouncing off you, you also shielded other members of your team. In other words, your reaction to my action benefited your team.” John regarded them. “That’s what this is all about folks. Working together toward a common goal. The common goal is the good of Sunn Advertising. Reacting against sudden actions like my tossing the football may seem like an act of self-preservation, and it is. You may perform acts of self-preservation on the job—working to get that website done before the deadline, for instance. You do it because if you don’t, you’ll get fired, right?”

Jose Garcia, one of Sunn Advertising’s web designer’s laughed. “You got that right, bro.”

John smiled. “So there you go. Go forth and when you get to your destination take in what’s around you. Assess it. Consider the team members you are with. Then, act accordingly.”

Cathy wasn’t sure what to act on in this remote part of the island. John must have picked this spot on purpose just for the three of them. She glanced at Wendy, who shook her head. A silent communication seemed to pass between them.
I bet Jim told that consultant that we’re his problem children
, that look seemed to say.
And he stuck us out here to torture us.

Melissa glanced around at the remote section of beach. “Well, this is just stupid. I don’t know what he wants us to do here! It’s just the three of us. There’s nobody else here!”

“He must have picked this spot for a reason,” Wendy said. She nodded out at the ocean. “Take a look, Melissa. Isn’t it beautiful?”

Melissa glanced at the ocean and frowned. The sky had been filled with a bunch of birds earlier that day—seagulls, pigeons, crows. It was like that old Hitchcock movie,
The Birds
. Cathy glanced out at the ocean and saw what Wendy was getting at. The view from this end of the island, the peacefulness of this spot, the nature, it was very beautiful.

“All I see is a bunch of sand and rocks and water,” Melissa said. She craned her neck around, looking up at the large cliff wall that rose fifty yards and ended in scrub bush above. A second path wound its way steeply up the cliff toward civilization, with residential streets, homes, and apartments. “It’s ugly down here. Why didn’t he lead us up where there’s people?”

“He wanted us to come down here,” Cathy said, trying to wrap her mind around this exercise and what the end of this particular path meant. “He had a reason. Let’s try to figure that out.”

“I think he wanted us to appreciate this,” Wendy said. She tilted her head in the direction of the ocean. Wendy was twenty years younger than Cathy, in her early thirties. She was short, slightly chunky in hip and bust, and wore her brown frizzy hair to mid-back. “I think that when you pluck us out of our environment, which is constantly busy, and you come to this…” She looked out at the ocean, shaking her head. “We seem to get so worked up by such trivial things at the office. You know? The kind of things that don’t mean anything in the grand scheme of things. Who answers the phone first. Not listening to each other when one of us is trying to make a system work, or ridiculing a new process—”

Melissa sighed. “Jesus Christ, this isn’t about the new database, is it?”

Cathy shrugged. “Wendy has a point, Melissa. Jim hired me to create the database and you’ve been nothing but resistant to the idea. It’s made my job kinda difficult.”

“How has it made it difficult? You’re doing such a fine job on it!”

Cathy looked at Melissa as if she’d lost her mind. Wendy chuckled sarcastically.

“You’re looking at me as if
I’m
the problem,” Melissa said, her features incredulous.

“You hired me to create and maintain the database, correct?” Cathy asked.

“Of course.”

“And I did that. I also sat with you on three one-on-one training sessions to teach you how to query the database and pull the results into an Excel spreadsheet. Right?”

“Umm…yeah?” Melissa was getting that look that said,
oh no, here it comes
.

“What have you been doing since then?”

Silence from Melissa. Wendy answered for her. “She’s been going back to doing manual data entry on five different spreadsheets on multiple workbooks and adding things up on a manual calculator.”

Melissa turned to Wendy. “And that system
works!
It’s what our customers
want!
It’s what they expect.”

“Our biggest account likes the web portal I created for them based off that database and the Crystal Report Cathy created,” Wendy said. “Our sales contact there was really confused when you sent them that last report with all those Excel attachments.”

Melissa heaved a big sigh that said,
you idiots!
Cathy and Wendy glanced at each other, then back at their direct report. “Maybe they like your database and your web portal thingy better, but the Excel spreadsheets we have is the way we’ve been doing things at Sunn for twenty years and—”

“Jim brought the both of us into the company to move us into the twenty-first century,” Cathy said. “He likes the work we’re doing. Our clients love the new reports. Our sales team will like it too if you’ll only let them use it.”

“Okay, this is enough!” Melissa put both hands up in exasperation and turned her back on Cathy and Wendy. She was breathing hard and fast. “What, are we supposed to just argue here or something? What kind of a stupid team building exercise is this?”

“We’re supposed to work together as a team,” Wendy said. “That’s the whole nature of this thing. By being thrust in this situation he’s created for us, we’re supposed to mutually work together for the whole of the group. We’ve been trying to do this since Jim hired us, but it’s become more and more difficult for us when you keep insisting we use your spreadsheets that are a waste of time, a waste of—”

Melissa whirled back around, her eyes smoldering with anger. “They are
not
a waste of time!”

CLICK-CLICK! CLICK-CLICK! CLICK-CLICK!

The sudden loud clicking noise startled all three of them and Cathy jumped in fright when she saw the creature amble forth from behind a rock. It was approaching from Melissa’s blind side, and she turned around and screamed at the top of her lungs when she saw it. Another flurry of clicks behind them and Wendy screamed too. When Cathy looked toward her left—the south side of the island—she saw two more of the creatures.

They were like something from outer space. The biggest one was about the size of a small sofa, the other two about the size of large dogs. They looked like a weird mash up between a lobster and a scorpion. Their blood-red claws clacked together furiously, creating a cacophony of noise that sent all three women into shrieks of hysteria. Their segmented tails arched over their backs and Cathy saw that their stingers were long, heavy, and sharp. A yellowish fluid dripped from one of them.

Melissa scampered away from the creature near the water, joining Cathy and Wendy. The three creatures moved in, their claws clicking loudly. From behind them, another creature emerged from the water. She caught a whiff of the briny stench wafting off the monsters’ shells. Overhead, a bird squawked in panic as several more of the beasts emerged from the ocean. These were larger than the first—each one the size of an automobile.

Cathy glanced toward the path they’d come down on. It was completely blocked by the creatures.

“There!” Wendy grabbed Cathy and pointed at another path in front of Melissa, who stood rooted to the spot, staring with wide-eyed fear as the creatures advanced. It was the second path that led toward the road above. “We can escape that way!”

Cathy grabbed Melissa’s shoulders and tried to shove her forward. Melissa screamed and tried to fight her. Cathy’s fight or flight instinct kicked in and for five seconds there was a flurry of slapping hands and yells, screams of “get your hands off me, bitch!” and “stop struggling, we’re trying to help you!” As quick as the brief catfight had erupted, it stopped. Melissa glared at Cathy and Wendy but it wasn’t out of anger—it was out of cold fear. “There’s no way out,” she said.

The creatures let out a warbling sort of hiss and advanced closer, black eyestalks bobbing back and forth. They were only twenty feet away now. Cathy had the feeling they could move incredibly fast if they wanted to. They had only seconds to flee before the creatures charged toward them. If they could only get past Melissa….

“We need to leave now,” Cathy said. She grabbed Melissa’s shoulders and tried to herd her forward again toward the second path. Wendy tried to help, but this time Melissa protested again. She fought them off, screaming at the top of her lungs. “There’s another one in the bushes over there! It’s right there, it’s coming this way!”

“Oh, fuck this,” Wendy said. The younger woman was clearly frightened half to death, but Cathy could read the frustration in the tone of her voice. She gripped Melissa’s blouse.

“Then get the hell out of our way then,” Cathy said to Melissa. And then, with what seemed to be a synchronized effort, Cathy and Wendy grabbed Melissa and shoved her aside, sending her sprawling into the bushes at the side of the path. They ran toward the path and began climbing it as quickly as possible.

A creature surged forward, looming over Melissa and waving its claws. Then, with one quick movement, it seized her around the hips with its pincers and began to squeeze. The serrated edges sliced into her flesh. Her bones cracked.

Oblivious to her plight, Cathy and Wendy fled. The clicking sounds behind them were followed by screams of pain.

“Oh God,” Melissa shrieked, “get them off me, oh God, that hurts! Oh Goooooddddd!”

“Get me out of here, please get me out of here,” Cathy chanted to herself as she clambered up the path, her complete effort on getting the hell away from the beach. Wendy was hot on her heels behind her. They clambered up a good fifty feet before they were able to reach a spot where they could afford to look down.