Chapter 2: Orientation, Respawning, and Other Duties as Assigned

Chapter 2: Orientation, Respawning, and Other Duties as Assigned

The slam of the vault door echoed in the concrete hallway, but it did nothing to silence the scraping voice in Eddie’s head. Ramirez. It had known his name. He was leaning against the opposite wall, his breath coming in ragged gulps, the cold sweat on his neck turning icy in the tomb-like air.

Mort, on the other hand, looked merely inconvenienced. He adjusted the lapels of his ill-fitting suit and made a small, dissatisfied noise in the back of his throat. “Well, that concludes the tour of the active-file storage. Try not to think about it too much. It upsets the inventory.”

“Upsets the—!” Eddie choked, pushing himself off the wall. “That thing, that shadow in the corner, it knew my name! What the hell was it?”

“A personnel file from a rival agency, currently under review,” Mort said with the dismissive air of a man discussing office politics. He turned and began walking back toward the beige-and-grey safety of the cubicle farm. “It’s of no concern to you. Your concern is the field.”

Back at the desk, buried under its paper mountain, the suffocating normality felt like a lie. Mort handed Eddie a thin, spiral-bound booklet with a cheerful sun logo and the words “Sunny Side Up Employee Handbook” on the cover. It looked like it had been printed on a mimeograph machine in 1983.

“This will cover most of your questions regarding dental, parking, and paradox-stain removal,” Mort droned.

Eddie stared at him, the handbook limp in his hand. “What happens if I run into something like that… that shadow thing… out there? In the field? You saw me, I froze. What if I’m not fast enough?” It was the most important question. The job paid well, but no amount of money was worth being unmade by a sentient hole in reality.

Mort took a long, slow sip from his ‘World’s Okayest Reaper’ mug. He set it down with a soft click. “An understandable concern. Which brings us to your primary employee benefit, outlined in subsection 4, paragraph C: The Post-Termination Reintegration Protocol.”

“The what?”

“Upon catastrophic failure of your corporeal form—,” Mort began, reciting from memory.

“You mean when I die?” Eddie interrupted, his voice sharp.

“Please don’t use such dramatic language. It creates paperwork,” Mort sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Upon said ‘catastrophic failure,’ your employment contract will trigger a reset. A respawn, if you want to use the vulgar vernacular. You will reintegrate at a designated, stable anchor point within the region. Fully intact. Mostly.”

Eddie just stared. He waited for the punchline, for the wry grin that would say this was all part of some bizarre temp agency hazing ritual. But Mort’s face was as unchanging as a gravestone. “Respawn? Like in a video game?”

“Video games are crude, simplistic appropriations of fundamental cosmic law. But, in essence, yes,” Mort conceded. “Your consciousness, your self, is now tethered to this temporal jurisdiction. Severing that tether is… difficult.” He leaned forward, his inky eyes holding a flicker of something almost like sympathy, or perhaps just extreme weariness. “But every time it happens, Mr. Ramirez, it creates a ripple. A paradox. And I have to file a report for every single one. Causal anomaly reports, quantum entanglement variance forms, spectral signature reconciliations… It is a nightmare. So please, try not to die. It’s a tremendous inconvenience for management.”

The anchor point, Mort explained, was the Circle K on Palmdale Road in Adelanto. Eddie knew it well. He’d bought countless cups of burnt coffee and questionable hot dogs there at three in the morning. The idea that his soul was now cosmically tethered to its slushie machine was too much to process.

“Now,” Mort said, clearly done with the orientation, “your first assignment.” He slid a thin manila folder across the desk. It had a single coffee ring stain on it. “A standard Unscheduled Departure. Happened last night.”

Eddie opened the folder. Inside was a single, grainy photo of a sedan nosed into the dirt off Highway 395 and a short report. Victim: John Doe. Cause of Death: Pending. The report noted the body had already been recovered by local authorities. What caught Eddie’s eye was the field at the bottom labeled “Irregularity Noted.” The entry was short: Anomalous Flora Proximity.

“Anomalous flora?” Eddie asked, looking up. “You mean he was, what, attacked by a cactus?”

“That is what you are being paid to ascertain,” Mort said, already turning his attention to a teetering stack of forms. “Go to the location. Observe the scene. Note anything out of the ordinary. Fill out form 17-B, ‘Field Inventory Report,’ and return it. And remember the primary directive.”

“Observe, Record, Do not interfere,” Eddie recited, the words tasting like ash.

The trip back through the phantom elevator was just as disorienting. One moment he was in the soul-crushing beige office, the next he was standing in the dusty, sun-blasted aircraft hangar, the doors sliding shut behind him with a soft, final ding. He half-expected the elevator to vanish, but it remained, a silent steel scar on the face of reality.

Back in the familiar, rattling cabin of his Ranger, the desert heat felt real. The cracked dashboard, the bobblehead hula girl, the smell of old upholstery—it was all blessedly, tangibly normal. He pulled the employment contract from his pocket. The ink was still there, dark and unmoving. It wasn’t a dream.

The coordinates from the file led him twenty miles out into the scrubland, where the 395 was a lonely ribbon of asphalt. He saw the spot from a quarter-mile away. The scuffed dirt shoulder, the tire tracks leading nowhere. The local sheriff had already come and gone, leaving nothing but a faint chalk outline on the gravel, a sad, human-shaped space where a life had ended.

Eddie got out of his truck, the crunch of his boots feeling loud in the oppressive silence. He had his new company-issued “inventory kit”—a clipboard, a disposable camera, and a ridiculously outdated flip phone. He felt like a fool.

Then he saw it.

The car had run off the road and stopped here. The chalk outline was here. And right next to it, so close that its branches would have been brushing the driver’s side window, was a Joshua Tree.

That was wrong. Eddie was a desert rat, born and raised. He knew Joshua Trees. They were slow, majestic things. They didn’t spring up overnight right on the highway’s shoulder. More importantly, this one was… twisted. Its spiny arms weren’t reaching for the sun in their usual, haphazard way. They were coiled, bent at sharp, unnatural angles, all seeming to point down toward the chalk outline, like fingers directing his gaze. The ground around its base was a mess of disturbed soil, as if it had dragged itself out of the earth and across the ten feet of desert that separated it from the road.

This was the “anomalous flora.”

He dutifully took out his clipboard and began to write. “Site is clear. Vehicle removed. One (1) chalk outline, adult male. One (1) Yucca brevifolia, approx. 12 ft. in height, located in atypical proximity to the point of departure…”

He stopped writing. His eyes traced the path from where the tree should have been to where it now stood. He could see a faint trail in the dirt, a shallow trench. The official report would say the driver had a heart attack, or swerved to avoid a coyote, and died of natural causes in a freak accident.

But Eddie was looking at a murder weapon.

Mort’s voice echoed in his head. Observe. Record. Do not interfere.

He looked at the clipboard in his hand, the neat little boxes waiting to be checked. He could fill it out, turn it in, and collect his ridiculously generous paycheck. It was the smart thing to do. The safe thing to do.

But the question burned in his gut, the same stubborn curiosity that had gotten him fired for “insubordination” more than once. How? How does a plant, a damn tree, move across the desert and kill a man in his car?

He glanced back at his Ranger. There was a tire iron under the passenger seat. Brute force might not be the answer for everything, but sometimes, you just had to poke the weird thing to see what it did.

He dropped the clipboard in the dirt. The primary directive could go to hell. He was going to get some answers.