The Starving Years Read online

  Javier’s subtle smile crept wider. His teeth were brilliantly white against his dark skin. “Copywriter.”

  “I knew it….”

  A burst of shrieks startled Nelson out of his seduction trajectory. “Cheese! Cheese! We have the cheese!” Across the room, Marianne jumped up and down like she’d just won the lottery. She waved her piece in the air, and hauled the arm of the accountant-looking guy beside her up and down along with it. He placidly accepted that it would be easier to resist a force of nature.

  The glitzy presenter strode to the edge of the stage with the mystery boxes. “Whoever said the cheese stands alone? Not today.”

  Shit. Couldn’t Marianne have waited another few seconds to start screaming about her cheese? Nelson went into overdrive on his phone number acquisition attempt. “And here’s the part,” he said, “where they tell you to get the contact information of whoever you’re talking to.”

  Not particularly smooth, but it promised a better outcome than hoping he’d run into Javier at the subway station afterward, or tearing the puzzle piece out of Marianne’s hand, calling her a liar, and insisting the exercise carry on until he could find a better way to get Javier’s number. He pulled a business card from his pocket and held it out to Javier expectantly. Javier looked at the card like he didn’t buy that it was part of the exercise, but was deciding whether or not to humor Nelson anyway, when the presenter said, “All right. Everyone back in your seats. I’ll call out the names of the flavors and we’ll split you into teams….”

  Javier looked from the card to Nelson’s eyes, and made a micro-movement as if he was about to turn away. Nelson stuffed his card into the pocket of Javier’s sportcoat. “No way I’m going to get picked out of this crowd for a real interview—but if you hear of anyplace else that’s hiring lab guys, let me know.”

  “Okay…sure.” Javier turned and made his way back to his seat without giving Nelson a card in return. Nelson sighed and went back to his table. He hadn’t ranged even five feet from his starting point.

  Marianne plunked down next to him and peeled back the corner of the paper that covered her big prize. She clucked her tongue in disgust, and whispered, “Exotic Spices? Ew. They all taste like funk.”

  Nelson agreed. “Too much turmeric.”

  She leaned in close. “So that jerk next to you gets a hundred bucks and I get this? That blows.”

  “I’d tell you no one ever said life was fair, but then I’d have to put a dollar in my cliché jar.”

  The presenter said, “We’re going to do sweet on one side of the room and savory on the other.” Another chance to bring the mysterious Javier around to his obvious charms? Nelson perked up for a moment, but then realized that he had sweet mint, and Javier had savory verde. No problem, he’d trade. Marianne would probably be willing to give up her cheese, although who knew if she’d need that game piece for a real reward later, since the Exotic Spices seemed perilously close to a booby prize.

  “Along the right wall, I want the following: coconut, chocolate….”

  Nelson turned toward Randy. “What do you have?”

  Randy actually had to check his puzzle piece. What, he’d been looking at it for the past ten minutes and he still didn’t know? “Uh…a jalapeño pepper.”

  Unbelievable. Nelson plucked it from his hand and shoved the mint piece in its place. “Here. Now you’re fresh and zippy. Go stand by the cute girl in the orange sweater.”

  While Randy might have wanted to balk at being told what to do—especially by a long-haired homo misfit like Nelson—the girl in the orange sweater really was awfully cute. Nelson saw she had a wedding ring on, but Randy would probably be too busy staring at her rack to notice.

  The savories all trooped to the other side of the room, where Nelson picked Javier out from two dozen other hopeful Canaan Products employees, and sidled up to his sighted side.

  Javier’s eye went to Nelson’s hand, as if he could see through it to the puzzle piece. “Aren’t you on the wrong team? Or are you just a creative cook?”

  “They say mint and lamb went well together—but, hey. They still eat termites in Ghana, so what do ‘they’ know?” Nelson held up his half of verde. “I’ve never really been much for mint.”

  Javier looked amused. He didn’t seem like the type to be amused lightly, either, which only made Nelson want to try even harder. “Where’d you get the verde?”

  “Does it matter? We’re lucky we didn’t score that particular prize, trust me.”

  The presenter dipped into his big box of tricks and pulled a bunch of clotheslines, a stack of index cards, and a wad of bandannas.

  “It’s time for a little game of ‘Make that Shape.’ Five people from each side will lead the team by giving directions, and the rest of you will need to form the ropes into the shapes the callers describe to you—blindfolded.”

  “It just gets lamer and lamer,” Nelson whispered, but when he looked to see if he could elicit some agreement from Javier, instead of a complicit disdain, he detected something entirely else: dismay. Javier’s olive skin looked ashen, and his mouth was set in a stiff line.

  Of course. Only a jackass would blindfold a one-eyed man in a room full of strangers. Even Nelson, who prided himself in being the poster boy for self-involvement, knew that much.

  “So I’ll need the five team leaders from sweet and five from savory to step up and get the gear….”

  “Go up there.” Nelson gave Javier a little shove toward the stage. Did he need to be more explicit about his reasoning, or would Javier take the ball and run with it? “You’d make a good team leader.”

  Javier looked spooked, but either he intuited Nelson’s plan to keep him from being blindfolded, or he trusted enough in Nelson’s confidence that he was willing to lead the way for the savory side.

  “That’s the same guy you were talking to during the ice breaker,” Marianne said.

  “Really? Are you sure it wasn’t one of the other guys with eye patches?”

  The sarcasm rolled off Marianne’s back. Tenacious girl. “Are you cruising him? You are, aren’t you?”

  Nelson sighed. “It’s not like I’m deluded enough to think I’m going to get a job out of this thing. I’ll settle for a phone number.”

  “He kind of looks like a movie pirate, doesn’t he?”

  He did. An especially hot movie pirate. All he needed was a puffy shirt. Nelson warmed toward Marianne a bit, though he kept his expression neutral, as he didn’t care to show anyone the chinks in his armor on such short acquaintance.

  “I guess you can’t actually say that,” she went on. “It would be like telling an amputee that their prosthetic turned you on.”

  “Do you mind? My subconscious already has plenty of awkward things to blurt out. It doesn’t need any more ideas from you.”

  Javier returned with a clothesline, plus four bandannas, which he passed out to Javier, Marianne, an a couple of other white guys in ties. It felt awkward to take the bandanna. Nelson suspected he’d blown his chance at a date by acknowledging the eye, even in such a roundabout way—though if he’d let events unfold without saying anything, it probably would have ended in Javier bailing on the conference right there and then, or even worse, suffering some kind of mortifying post-traumatic panic attack. So any way he looked at it, Nelson figured the date was an unlikely outcome.

  What a shame. Javier was profoundly hot…though unlike most men who dug men, he seemed strangely resistant to Nelson’s charms. But, Nelson supposed, if he really felt like scratching that itch, it wasn’t as if he’d have trouble hooking up with someone else. There were always more fish in the sea.

  And now he owed another dollar to his cliché jar.

  He tied the bandanna over his eyes, and reassured himself that every minute of the conference he endured put him a minute closer to getting home and seeing how quickly he could find some pirate porn online. Unless a miracle happened, and Javier gave in and surrendered his phone number. Nelson wasn’t go
ing to discount that possibility until he went home empty-handed.

  “Team leaders, unwrap your clotheslines. Team players, check each other’s blindfolds and make sure they’re on good and tight. Anyone whose blindfold slips will be disqualified.”

  A hand groped up Nelson’s arm, then felt its way up to the bandanna. He felt a body press close to his, and smelled shampoo and a hint of perfume—lady stuff. Marianne gave his knot a rudimentary check, then spoke in his ear. “That was nice, what you did with the blindfolds.”

  Very observant. Plus, she’d won one of the stupid prizes. She’d probably get a callback. Nelson shrugged the arm she was holding onto.

  “All set?” The blindfold cutting off Nelson’s vision made the announcer seem twice as loud. “Okay. Team leaders, take card number one, and look at the shape. Be the first to get your team to create that shape by arranging the rope without naming it, and you’ll all win—”

  The pause went on longer than Nelson would have expected. Maybe he was showing the prize to the team leaders. Hopefully it wasn’t more of that Exotic Spices crap. The sound of people standing around quietly was louder with the blindfolds on, too. Nelson could hear the rustle of their clothes as they shifted, and a few indistinct whispers.

  “Something’s wrong,” Javier murmured. He pulled off Nelson’s blindfold.

  Something really was wrong. After a moment of disorientation, Nelson realized the room had gone dark. “It’s just some gimmick to test our problem-solving skills.” He could picture the doors he’d scoped out earlier. He and Javier were only a few yards away from the door in the divider wall. His patience had been teetering on the tipping point, and this latest insult, plunging them all into darkness just to see how they’d react, was the last straw.

  His eyes adjusted grudgingly to the glow of a Canaan Products laptop a few yards away. People shuffled, disturbed by the long, awkward pause, though most of them had left their blindfolds in place. The event coordinator was at the edge of the stage, whispering to the presenter. Maybe the darkness hadn’t been planned, after all.

  Javier moved through the crowd, sinuous and stealthy, without alerting the rest of the job seekers that something was wrong. He was at the laptop before anyone else even thought to remove a blindfold.

  Marianne tugged Nelson’s sleeve. “What’s going on?”

  He bent and spoke low in her ear. “Power failure, or some screwup like that. Take that thing off.” He pulled off her blindfold but kept his eye on Javier even as he spoke, thinking that if there were a downed power line, a rolling blackout or most any sort of electrical issue, the laptop would be useless. Yes, it had battery power. But the building’s wireless network wouldn’t.

  A moment later, Javier realized as much. He gave up on the laptop and headed back toward Nelson, threading through the blindfolded crowd just as silently on his return trip. “You think it’s something bad?” Nelson asked. He could think of a dozen flavors of “bad,” including a bomb, a pandemic outbreak and a biological terrorist attack. Not that any of those things was likely, just that he was in the habit of looking at problems from every possible angle.

  “I don’t know.” Even with one eye hidden, Javier’s expression said otherwise. “But we should play it safe.” He turned toward the main entrance.

  “Not that way.” Nelson looped one arm through Javier’s, and took Marianne by the shoulder with his other hand. “That’s a bottleneck just waiting to happen.”

  They were groping for the latch of the divider door when the first gunshots sounded.

  Chapter 3

  It might have been something other than gunshots—for instance, maybe a car was backfiring. Even Nelson, who normally couldn’t resist exploring every possibility, no matter how far-fetched, didn’t bother coming up with more examples of what else those bangs could possibly have been. Three sharp pops—crack, crack, crack—followed by a single, thin, faintly audible wail.

  Whatever just went down…it was ugly.

  The conference room crowd hadn’t quite figured out how to react. There was shuffling, followed by some indrawn breaths and a few disconcerted murmurs. Nelson let go of Javier’s elbow, grabbed the room divider latch, and pulled. Though it was locked, adrenaline gave him the strength to pull harder than the cheap mechanism cared to resist, and with a tiny, metallic pop, the divider door opened.

  Since he still had Marianne by his other hand, he swung her around and propelled her through the door first. Then Javier—he wasn’t going to let that one get away over something as petty as a shooting spree. As he took his first step through the flimsy threshold himself, panic finally erupted in the conference room, and suddenly the crowd turned from a group of civilized men and women in button-up shirts, wool suits and sensible shoes into a troop of savage baboons.

  Shoving ensued, and a few punches landed before everyone had even figured out they should probably take off their blindfolds—although given the lack of light, even ditching the blindfolds didn’t help their disorientation. Someone toppled into Nelson, slamming him into the doorframe so hard it knocked the breath out of him and caused the fake wall to flex.

  A hand clamped on his shoulder and spun him around, away from the door. Nelson found himself face to face with Randy, whose blindfold was up around his forehead as if he thought he was the Karate Kid. Relief washed over Randy’s face as he recognized Nelson by the distant glow of the nearest laptop. “Hey, bro, was that a gun?”

  Nelson tried to pull away, but Randy’s sympathetic nervous system was just as primed as his, and Randy clung so hard he split the shoulder seam of Nelson’s dress shirt. Nelson loathed that shirt and everything it stood for, which was probably why, in a burst of unexpected compassion, he said, “C’mon, we gotta get out of here.” It was tempting to add, “Bro,” though he could tell the sarcasm would be lost amidst all the noise.

  The acoustical fabric of the divider wall didn’t totally muffle the sound of the growing panic, but it dulled all the sharp edges, and blended the chorus of frightened voices into a foreboding hum. The adjacent room was dark and vast, and it smelled like stale vacuum cleaner bags. Marianne’s cell phone was a beacon. It threw its small blue light over her frightened features, and illuminated the closest tables and chairs they were likely to trip over. “Nelson!” she cried. “Hurry!”

  Nelson dodged a laminated table and a stack of molded chairs, and followed. Randy, firmly attached to his arm, was right on his heels.

  Up ahead, Javier wove through the tables in the near-dark like a shadow, heading for the opposite side of the room. Nelson caught up with him at yet another acoustical wall, and shook Randy from his arm so he could help find the door. His hand brushed Javier’s—and for the first time that day…heck, maybe that year…he felt well and truly alive.

  Marianne held her cell phone high, casting as much light as she could with the tiny screen. “Here,” Randy called. Maybe he wasn’t quite as useless as Nelson had thought. Or maybe he was just having a lucky day.

  No, he did usher Marianne through before he cut off Nelson. Chivalry was not dead. Nelson took a cue from Randy and hustled Javier out the door before he went himself. He didn’t really get to touch Javier—not like when their hands had brushed. But his senses were so heightened that even the texture of Javier’s jacket was as good as an aphrodisiac.

  One more empty conference hall, this one with all the tables clustered toward one end, in a mound that looked freakish and ominous by the light of Marianne’s phone. Everyone broke into a sprint and began groping at the far wall, searching for the exit, when the lights flickered on, burned low and brown for a few seconds, and went out again.

  “There.” Javier groped for Nelson now, turning him toward the wall behind the tables. “The door was there.”

  Nelson seized the opportunity to lock arms with Javier again and drag him toward the sea of tables so they could navigate it together. The tables were round, more suited for a banquet than a conference, and the faux woodgrain laminate tabletops we
re so dark they were nearly invisible, save for a thin crescent of reflectiveness at the edge of each one, a small gleam that winked in and out as Marianne began to make her way through the maze of plastic and metal.

  A loud thud sounded to Nelson’s right. “Fuck!” Randy gasped. “Right in the nuts.”

  It was dark, so Nelson allowed himself to smile. Although he might have done the same by the cold light of day.

  Marianne reached the door first and pulled it open. A rectangle of muted light framed her. The door had been in a real wall, which led to a real hall with real windows. The city beyond the windows was gray…grayer than usual, with sleet pelting down to slant between the corridors of the skyscrapers.

  They staggered out into the hall, blinking against the dim light. The sound of the rest of the conference carried from down the long hall, three room-divisions wide, and around the corner. Crashes. Shouting. Screaming. The sound of fear—all of it muted by yards and yards of acoustical fake walls.

  “The stairs,” Marianne gasped. Good thinking. The elevators would all be stuck.

  Marianne took the lead and pulled Javier along behind her. Nelson hung on to Javier and Randy clung to Nelson, and together they all pounded down the dark stairwell, six turns in all, until they came at last to a fire door, burst through it, and spilled into a shipping dock that led to Astor, where several leaky, reeking dumpsters waited for the garbage trucks to haul away their contents.

  “Go,” Javier said, propelling Marianne forward, and Nelson and Randy strung along behind them. The roar of a crowd, punctuated by sirens and screams, and the electronic hollowness of the voices of authority projected over loudspeakers, swelled as they spilled onto Ninth and Astor at the edge of the mob.

  A police van pulled up beside them and a dozen of New York’s Finest—in full riot gear—poured out. The cops ran past in tight formation, shields high. Nelson paused to look; he’d never seen a riot before. But he wasn’t interested enough to let go of Javier, who dragged him away from the deteriorating situation, and he in turn towed Randy along to bring up the rear.