Chapter 1: The Strangest Temp Agency in Adelanto

Chapter 1: The Strangest Temp Agency in Adelanto

The Mojave heat was a physical weight, pressing down on the cracked vinyl dashboard of Eddie Ramirez’s ’98 Ford Ranger. It smelled of sun-baked dust, old coffee, and the faint, sweet rot of desperation. His phone, screen fractured like a spiderweb, displayed the email for the tenth time. It was the only reply he’d gotten in a month of shotgunning his resume to every warehouse, logistics hub, and back-alley operation between Victorville and Barstow.

SUNNY SIDE UP JOB AGENCY Now Hiring: Field Inventory Specialist Location: [GPS Coordinates] Requirements: Strong stomach, reliable transportation, discretion. Compensation: Competitive.

“Competitive,” Eddie muttered to the bobblehead hula dancer on his dash. “So’s a pack of coyotes fighting over a dead lizard.”

But rent was due, and “competitive” was better than the symphony of crickets his bank account was currently performing. The GPS coordinates led him not to a strip mall office wedged between a vape shop and a laundromat, but deep into the abandoned expanse of George Air Force Base. The place was a concrete graveyard, haunted by the ghosts of Cold War bombers and decades of neglect. Tumbleweeds, the desert’s lazy scavengers, piled up against chain-link fences crowned with rust.

He parked the Ranger where the GPS told him to stop: in the cavernous maw of a derelict aircraft hangar. The air inside was thick and still, a decade of dust motes dancing in the shafts of light that pierced the decaying roof. And in the center of the vast, empty floor, stood a single, freestanding elevator door.

It wasn't attached to anything. Just a burnished steel frame and two doors, set into nothing, like a glitch in reality. Above it, a simple plastic sign read: “Sunny Side Up. Please Ring for an Appointment.”

“Okay,” Eddie said to the empty hangar. “This is either a really elaborate prank or a cult. Fifty-fifty.” He’d worked for worse. He pressed the button.

There was no sound, no whir of cables or groan of machinery, but a soft, pleasant ding echoed in the hangar. The steel doors slid open with impossible smoothness, revealing a small, wood-paneled box elevator, complete with a slightly sticky-looking floor and fluorescent lighting that hummed with oppressive cheerfulness.

With a shrug that said what’s the worst that could happen?, Eddie stepped inside. The doors closed, and for a heart-stopping moment, nothing happened. Then, instead of moving up or down, the world outside the doors seemed to blur and stretch, the crumbling hangar dissolving into a smear of brown and grey. He felt a lurch in his stomach, not of movement, but of… relocation. When the ding sounded again and the doors opened, he was no longer in the hangar.

He was in an office. A painfully, depressingly normal office. Grey cubicles, beige computers from the turn of the millennium, and the smell of burnt coffee so strong it could strip paint. A single man sat at a large metal desk in the back, hunched over a mountain of paperwork that defied gravity.

The man was impossibly thin, swimming in a cheap, black suit that looked at least twenty years out of style. His skin was the color of old parchment, and his eyes, when he finally looked up, were like pools of ink. They seemed to absorb the light and give nothing back. He raised a chipped ceramic mug to his lips. It read, ‘World’s Okayest Reaper.’

“Eddie Ramirez?” the man asked. His voice was sandpaper-dry, the sound of a thousand years of sighing.

“Yeah. You the manager?” Eddie’s voice came out steadier than he felt. His brain was still trying to file the freestanding elevator under ‘things that make sense.’ It wasn’t having much luck.

“Regional Manager, Desert Division,” the man corrected, placing a form on his desk and tapping a line with a long, bony finger. “You can call me Mort. It’s short for… well, you know.”

Eddie didn’t know, but he had a cold, creeping suspicion. He glanced at the mug again. “Reaper? Like, the band?”

Mort gave him a look so profoundly tired it felt like a physical force. “No. Not like the band.” He gestured to the rickety chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat, Mr. Ramirez. Your resume was… adequate. You’ve held sixteen jobs in the last ten years. Forklift certified. Fired from three for ‘insubordination.’ You have a knack for being in the wrong place at the right time. We can work with that.”

Eddie sat. The chair groaned in protest. “Look, man, no offense, but what is this place? Sunny Side Up Job Agency? And that elevator…”

“A necessary inconvenience. Keeps out the riff-raff,” Mort said, taking a sip from his mug. “We are a management agency, Mr. Ramirez. We manage… assets. Specifically, assets that have undergone unscheduled departures. The High Desert has always been a bit of a spillover zone, a weak point. Things leak through. Lately, the leaking has become a flood. My department is overwhelmed.”

Eddie’s mind raced. Assets? Spillover? It sounded like corporate-speak for toxic waste disposal. He’d done that once. It was messy. “So, what’s the job? ‘Field Inventory Specialist.’ Am I counting boxes in a warehouse?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Mort said, a flicker of something that might have been humor in his dark eyes. “You will be dispatched to sites of recent… departures. You will observe the asset, catalog its state, identify any irregularities, and file a report. In triplicate. The key directive is this, and I want you to burn it into your brain: Observe. Record. Do not interfere.”

It still sounded like a job. A weird one, but the pay on the email had been very competitive. “Okay. I can do that. Observe, record, don’t touch the merchandise. Got it.”

“Excellent.” Mort pushed a thin stack of papers across the desk. It was a standard employment contract, but the ink seemed to shift and writhe if you looked at it too long. “Sign here, here, and initial here.”

Eddie scanned the document. The language was dense, full of arcane clauses about ‘paradoxical contamination’ and ‘ontological integrity.’ He stopped at the listed salary. It was more than he’d ever made in his life. Enough to fix the Ranger, pay his rent for a year, and maybe even buy health insurance that wasn’t just a bottle of tequila and a roll of duct tape.

He picked up the pen. It was strangely cold to the touch. He signed his name.

As the ink dried, the air in the room grew heavy and cold. The fluorescent lights flickered, and for a split second, the man across the desk was no longer a gaunt figure in a cheap suit, but a skeleton enthroned in shadow, wearing the same tired expression. Eddie blinked, and Mort was just Mort again, stamping the contract with a heavy, leaden seal.

“Welcome aboard, Mr. Ramirez,” Mort said, his tone unchanged. “Now for your orientation tour.”

He stood and led Eddie away from the cubicle farm, down a hallway where the beige walls gave way to bare, weeping concrete. The temperature dropped with every step. They stopped before a heavy, vault-like door marked simply: CONTAINMENT.

“Most of your work will be in the field,” Mort explained, his voice echoing in the cold silence. “But occasionally, an asset is too… volatile to be left where it’s found. We bring them here for processing.”

He swung the heavy door open.

It wasn’t a warehouse. It was a nightmare library.

Rows upon rows of shelves stretched into an impossible darkness, but they weren’t holding boxes. They were holding moments of pure, unadulterated dread. In a glass tank, a patch of asphalt from a desert highway writhed and pulsed, whispering desperate apologies. On a steel hook hung a set of wind chimes made of yellowed bone that didn’t chime with the air but sang a discordant melody about forgotten colors. Further down, a child’s tricycle perpetually circled a chalk outline, its little bell ringing a frantic, silent alarm.

Eddie’s breath caught in his throat. His pragmatic, seen-it-all attitude finally shattered. This wasn’t toxic waste. This was something else entirely. Something ancient and wrong.

“What… what are these things?” he managed to ask, his voice a hoarse whisper.

“Irregularities. Loose ends. Paperwork waiting to be filed,” Mort said, his tone utterly flat, as if describing a shipment of office supplies. “Most are harmless once contained. Static echoes of a bad moment.” He paused, his dark eyes fixing on a shadowy corner at the far end of the aisle. “Some, however, are more active.”

Eddie followed his gaze. In the deepest shadows, something stirred. It was a shape, a form made of pure darkness, more a hole in the world than a thing in it. It had no features, no face, but he felt it look at him. A voice, like the scraping of rock on bone, slithered directly into his mind.

Ramirez.

It knew his name.

The shadow writhed, its non-existent form coiling as if to strike. Eddie took a step back, his hand flying to his mouth to stifle a scream.

Mort slammed the vault door shut, plunging them back into the relative safety of the concrete hallway. The silence that followed was broken only by the frantic pounding of Eddie’s own heart.

“That one,” Mort said, straightening his slightly-too-large tie, “is a recent acquisition. That’s the kind of thing you’ll be cataloging, Mr. Ramirez. And the kind of thing you will not, under any circumstances, interfere with. Any questions?”

Eddie could only shake his head, his mind reeling. The competitive salary suddenly felt very, very small.