Chapter One

Herbert was despondent. As he parked his tri-colored Geo Prism in the only available spot in the employee's lot, he sighed deeply at the prospect of another double shift. He didn't exactly need the extra money, and he certainly wasn't looking for advancement, but he had volunteered to pick up the extra slack after Tammy left solely because there wasn't anything else to do. Life was emptier than ever, and although Herbert knew burying himself in work wouldn't make him forget that fact, it somehow felt less pointless doing something he cared nothing about rather than doing nothing he cared something about.

The guard at the front desk gave him a disinterested glance and a nonchalant wave through the outer door to the plant before returning to his issue of NASCAR Monthly. Herbert wondered to himself why the plant still employed the guard, after the sudden installation of the new automated security protocol machines this spring. He entered the stark metal lobby and crossed it to the inner door, where pressure plates activated a preprogrammed welcome sequence.

"Good morning! Welcome to Plant Five, Failsafe Department," a pre-recorded female voice crooned in a sultry, silky tone. Herbert found himself involuntarily imagining a tall, shapely underwear model. He knew the voice was probably recorded by a 340 lb., 42 year old woman somewhere, but in the absence of anything else worth thinking about in life, he decided the less likely imaginary source was a better choice, and allowed himself the indulgence. He named her Lisa.

"Are you an employee or a visitor?" Lisa asked, teasingly. "Please respond now."

"Eeeh..." Herbert hadn't spoken aloud yet today, and so this first word began with a dry crack, and he cleared his voice and repeated himself. "Employee."

"Thank you, and welcome back." Lisa's tone was still smooth and tantalizing, but it no longer had the purposeful flirtiness of the first recorded greeting. Herbert interpreted her tone as a reflection of disappointment, and somehow found himself wishing he could take it back and pretend to be a visitor, just to hear her remain alluring. "Please approach the scanner, place your forehead against the metal plate, and refrain from blinking."

Herbert stepped forward and bent down to line up his right eye with the sensor, which sent a brief, painful burst of light into his eye. He stumbled backward involuntarily, as he did every day, rubbing his eye. He imagined Lisa somewhere watching him and silently struggling to stifle laughter. "Bitch," he mumbled under his breath.

"I'm sorry, that command is not recognized. Please call technical support if the problem persists." Herbert choked back an additional invictive, and watched the progress bar on the screen as the station searched its database to match the pattern print it had just recorded of the blood vessels in his cornea. A small ping announced that a match had been made, and the inner door slid open with the sound of a soft pneumatic drive. Herbert walked through and onto the main floor of the plant.

He stepped down the center aisle past the desks of co-workers, some vacant, and some with colleagues embroiled in their tasks. He approached his own desk, and stopped in front of it, closing his eyes and breathing a great bracing sigh in reaction to the immense stack of work already towering in his inbox. He sat down and opened the drawer of his desk, placing his lunch inside and closing it, and then surveyed again the work that already greeted him this morning.

"Morning, Herbert," said Nancy at the desk to his right. She didn't look up or even pause from her work, which she continued with mechanical precision. Nancy had been at the plant when Herbert first was hired, and she was already a war-hardened veteran of the industry then. He admired the way in which she seemed to detach herself from her job, plowing ahead from the opening to the closing of every shift with no hesitation to greet colleagues or respond to their own conversations. Herbert wished he could detach himself from all of his own life in that way, and dial in his own attentions somewhere else. Anywhere else.

"Morning, Nancy," Herbert replied.

To his left, an immense sigh was broadcast, and he knew it was for their benefit. It came from Carson. Out of the corner of his eye, Herbert saw Carson fling his current task down on his desk, spread it out, and begin work on it again, a demonstration for their benefit that their distracting reparte had disrupted the flow of his work. Carson arrived early for work every day to meditate, and engaged in an elaborate routine of "cooling down" exercises at every shift. The front of his desk was lined with small 8.5" x 11" certificates proclaiming him employee of the month several dozen times. Herbert silently wished Carson a rousing case of genital warts.

Herbert cleared his mind, not a challenging or time consuming task, stretched his own hands, and began his own work. Taking the top piece from the inbox pile with both hands, he deftly flicked it out into full spread and let it fall softly onto his desk. He bent forward and ran his finger along the top to check the security of the header, and then flipped it over with one single snag and twist of his right index finger, letting it fall softly back to the desk, now front-up. He examined the seams and the entryway, a keen eye searching for loose ends, and finally slipped both hands inside either side, raised the arms together into the air, and pulled apart, allowing the piece to stretch between, and examining all the while for even the slightest irregularity. He set it back down, let each hand flip over before withdrawing, and then tossed the bottom edge to the top, folding the briefs into a square before tossing the perfectly squared garment into the "outbox" rolling metal bin located along the front right side of his desk.

One down, only two thousand eight hundred and seventy-nine to go.

No, wait, this is a double shift. Make that five thousand, seven hundred and fifty-nine. He grabbed the next pair of underwear and began the process anew.

This wasn't the first time he had taken on double shifts. Two years ago, he volunteered to pick up the slack until personnel could hire a replacement for Stanley King. Stanley had been caught pilfering from the plant, and there was a strict no-tolerance policy that the administration was quick to enforce. Looking back, Herbert was surprised he had not suspected Stanley. He parked an expensive Viper across three spots in the employee lot each day, and that alone should have been enough to raise suspicion (Plant Five salaries don't exactly support midlife crisis vehicles). Herbert also remembered believing that Stanley wore adult diapers, owing to the consistent bulge inches away from his torso all around his crotch; he had to admit, though, that he had noticed that Stanley seemed to come to work looking like any other employee, but appeared to change into those Depends sometime after lunch. In the end it didn't matter, though, as he was caught by an FBI sting trying to unload the goods online on eBay. Herbert still couldn't imagine whom out there was buying enough unpackaged men's briefson eBay from Stanley to support the purchase of the Viper.

The whole memory was vaguely disturbing, but more because of the double shifts Herbert had worked than due to the circumstances of Stanley's arrest. Eight hours is generally a long time to spend working closely with men's underwear, and working almost double than that daily was enough to evoke nightmares even after the doubles had ended. After Tammy's disappearance, though, Herbert couldn't bare to have the time to think of much else, and found that engrossing himself in briefs was yet a step up from the alternative.

Tammy. Herbert hesitated a moment with a pair stretched in his hands for stress testing, and glanced across the main aisle at the empty desk facing his, vacant now for two weeks. Herbert had watched Tammy for three months before even speaking to her, stealing glances mid-shift to watch her hands playfully dance with each pair of briefs, spinning a fabric ballet with each pair. Indeed, in handling men's underwear, Tammy had been a natural.

It had been only seventeen days ago when Herbert had finally worked up the courage to approach her at the end of a shift and invite her out for coffee. She had seemed distracted, even a little frightened, although Herbert thought (and hoped) it was not he of whom she was frightedned. She made a polite excuse about having other committments, but promised to take a raincheck and cash it in within a week or two. Herbert had spent that weekend daydreaming of that upcoming afternoon, the promise of a chance to get to know her better filling his heart with a hope normally foreign to him. That she hadn't come in to work on Monday was a disappointment. When she still hadn't returned to work by Wednesday, he began to take it personally. By last week, when personnel came around to indicate that she was being let go for unreported absences from work, Herbert had reached unique levels of personal self-hatred. If she could bear to inspect men's briefs for a living but couldn't bear the prospect of an afternoon date with Herbert, he surmised he wasn't worthy of much more than his own tasks at hand, and felt it a certain amount of poetic justice taking her shifts for a double.

Herbert tossed the forty-seventh pair of inspected and folded briefs into the "outbox" cart, and reached over mechanically for the next pair, when his hand touched something unexpected. Tucked into the access hatch of the next pair of briefs, Herbert saw a small, white envelope with his name written on the front in a hurried scrawl. He peeked to his left and right and noted that neither Nancy nor Carson had yet seen the note, so he carefully drew it off the pile and onto his desk.