One Ghost Per Serving (7 page)

Nathan addressed the four enchanters and overheard DZ making reservations for the circus in the phone booth around the corner from the office. He put the phone on mute but still covered the handset with his palm. “DZ, hang up the phone and get over here!”

Maybe he could move, Nathan thought, meet someone nice. A teacher? He could buy another house, maybe have a kid. There was no way he would even be willing to consider raising children while working with DZ; he would want to drive off a cliff. But if he moved …

“Okay, okay.” DZ told the person on the other line that he’d have to call back unless she could give him an order confirmation. He held up a finger to Nathan as he jotted down a number. Finally DZ hung up the phone, which was in a replica of a red London phone booth. He stood behind the desk and clicked on the chat window.

“This is DZ. I hope you’re having a great morning. Wait, is it morning where you are, or some kind of eternal night?” He laughed like he found that hilarious, then got serious. “Our client, Quantal Foods, wants to increase sales on Quantal Organic Yogurt, a new, as-yet-unknown brand. Your job as enchanters is to imbue the spirits in the yogurt.”

Nathan rolled his eyes and opened a spreadsheet on his laptop, which he had moved to a chair on the other side of the desk.

“The spirit stays dormant in the lid,” DZ said, and leaned against the window seat, arms crossed. “The commerce spirit will go into the customer when he consumes the product and make the customer insatiably desire the product. Repeat that back to me so I know you understand.”

Nathan was only half-listening. He manually calculated the depreciation tables for next year’s taxes.

DZ started walking back and forth behind the screens. “We have devised an Amass-and-Win contest with Quantal Organic Yogurt because we need this product to sell fast. We’ll be doing three phases of deployments, and I want this process
perfected
by phase one.” He paused by the screen and pointed at it, then smiled like a campaigning mayor.

“I need you to help me prove to Quantal –”

Nathan gave a grim smile at DZ’s skill.

DZ held up his hands like he was holding a ball. “ – that we can execute the spirit-imbuing process with near-100% reliability.”

The enchanters, all in dark hooded robes with unseen faces, murmured, nodded.

DZ rolled up his sleeves. “And achieve the client’s desired increase in sales by infecting,” he chuckled, eyes crinkling at the corners. The enchanters actually giggled.

“Oops,” DZ went on. “By
enhancing
susceptible hosts with biopersistent commerce spirits that make them crave that product. The spirits are absorbed, and they aren’t excreted. The nanomaterial – think of it as a Trojan horse – facilitates the translocation of the encapsulated spirit. Now all of that is fancy talk for ‘the customer eats the spirit and wants the product.’“

Nathan knew this was why DZ was the CEO of Cynosure Promotions. Well, that and his endless family money.

DZ slowly made fists with each hand like he was squeezing a stress ball. “I want all of you on my team. I can’t do this without you.” He pointed and made eye contact with each individual enchanter.

The enchanters blushed like schoolgirls. DZ wrapped up the chat and disconnected.

“Oh man,” DZ said as they left the office. He walked over to the side wall to the ping-pong table, picked up a paddle, and tapped the ball to a special handball-playing robot Nathan had tried to stop him from purchasing the previous month. “I’m going to look really good when I run these promotions and boost sales by like, 25,000%.”

Nathan leaned against a wall, already tired. “You didn’t tell me you were going ahead with the contest.”

DZ waved this off. “I’ve made the game period short so the product will move fast. I want results, like, yesterday.”

Tap tap, tap tap, TAP.
“Yeah!” DZ slapped his paddle down on the table and headed over to the middle of the office and climbed into his Galaxy Force Super Deluxe arcade game, which was akin to a carnival ride.

“How short a game period are we talking about?” Nathan asked, stopping DZ from starting the game.

“A week.” DZ put his hands on the wheel.

“We shouldn’t do any contests,” Nathan said.

“Why not?”

“We don’t have the staff for it.”

“What do we need that for?”

“Oh, I don’t know … oversight?”

“It’s all good,” DZ said, pretending he was in a drift heading into a straightaway. “I’ve made the grand prize damn near irresistible. Stores won’t be able to keep Quantal Organic Yogurt in stock – even BEFORE customers ingest the spirits. AND,” he punched Nathan’s shoulder, adding a charming lopsided grin. “
And
,” another punch. Nathan angled away and held his shoulder. “It doesn’t matter anyway. The contest is damn near unwinnable. The Amass-and-Win letters on the lids are glyphs from an ancient language that apparently only the oldest spirits know, so the enchanters tell me.”

Nathan rummaged around in a kitchen drawer for an aspirin.

“The contest rules specify that the game player has to spell ‘pudding’ with the glyphs. There’s only a miniscule fraction of a chance,” DZ pinched two fingertips together with a millimeter of space between them, “that someone would be able to spell that out with the glyphs, and even if they had that kind of dumb blind luck, the game period’s only a week long. If someone can round up enough foil lids, then accidentally spell the word – which even the world’s best linguistic anthropologist can’t decipher – and get his certified mail package into the prize handling facility in time, well, good for him or her. But that’s not gonna happen.”

Nathan pressed a glass against the fridge water dispenser and swallowed two aspirin.

DZ clapped his hands. “We’re good, then? I’m going to take two of the enchanters to the circus with me.”

“I’m not going to oversee your contest,” Nathan said, knowing full well that he would, just like he always cleaned the kitchen and ordered the office supplies. “And I’m not staying late to work on this just because you’re bored and can’t be alone.”

DZ put his fingertips to his chest and fake-gasped. “What? An enchanter is marvelous company.”

“You can’t stand the enchanters,” Nathan pointed out.

DZ pulled on his blazer and adjusted his collar and cuffs. “You can stay here and work, or you can go home and detail your bathroom with Q-Tips while Masterpiece Mystery plays in the background.”

Nathan didn’t think that sounded like a terrible idea.

“But
I,
my petulant friend, have places to go.” DZ grabbed the keys to his car and left.

Nathan sat in the Galaxy Force seat without turning on the power and relaxed into it. He wanted to stay there forever.

Eric rode his bike past Moog’s Smoke Shop and Pet Wash (‘We Have Beer’), going full-out fast to try and blast any thought that passed across his mind into oblivion.

A tri-axle logging truck stacked high with logs hurtled down the road toward him, and another truck roared up from behind him. He veered off the road into the grass, but the wind buffeted him right into a wet ditch in front of a life-sized plastic bison, several feet off the road. He spit mud out of his mouth and tested his limbs. He was mud-free on a narrow stripe of clothing on his right side.

His cell phone rang. Eric sat up, supported himself on his left elbow, and pulled out his phone.

“Hi.” He wiped a chunk of mud and grass off his face near his hairline.

“What’s wrong?” Willa asked. No-nonsense. She would want to formulate an action plan, despite placing his heart on an anvil and aiming a sledgehammer at it.

“A minor incident,” he said, flexing his elbow.

“You crashed your bike,” Willa said with a matter-of-fact tone. “I keep telling you to get a car.”

“I like my bike.” And he couldn’t afford a car along with the Princess, which was a rolling money pit. He may as well get a horse, though that probably had higher maintenance costs than a car.

“Taffy likes
her
bike, but she’s twelve and doesn’t have her driver’s license.”

Eric scooted back and leaned against the bison. A thatch of plastic fur jutted uncomfortably into his back. A dark blue luxury sedan cruised by, and slowed. The lawyers –

Striped Tie, Chronograph Watch, Thin Nose, and his friend Mark, driving – heading out of Jamesville back into the city.

Striped Tie stuck his head out the window. “I hope you used a condom!” he yelled.

Chronograph joined in. “Moo!”

The suits honked the car horn and erupted in laughter. Eric wondered if these guys actually spent any time at the office, or if they just drove around all day looking for people to make fun of.

“What was that?” Willa said over the phone. “Where are you?”

He rested an arm on his bent knee and cracked his neck to the side. “Almost home.”

“Good, you can do me a favor, unless you need to go to the hospital.” Willa hated being perceived as weak or vulnerable, so sometimes she acted brusque with him or with Taffy if either one fell off their bikes or ran into a wall.

“I’m fine,” Eric said.

“If you say so.” Willa paused for a half-second, a conversational glottal stop to get into the reason she called. “Taffy has something in the fridge that she needs tonight for her science fair project. I was going to –” she covered the phone to speak to someone in her office. “Sorry. I was going to get it to her myself but something came up at work. I tried John, but he has bronchitis, and then I tried Amy, but she was in a beading circle. Oh, and my assistant.”

His chest tightened. “I was the fourth person you asked?” He spread his legs out with a splash and hit his head against the bison’s flank. His knee was sore and bleeding and his elbow hurt.

“I didn’t want to bother you,” she said, quick and smooth. “Anyway, follow the detailed packaging instructions Taffy left on the fridge and take it over to the school by five p.m. She needs it for the judge’s review, and be sure you’re on time, or she’ll get disqualified.”

Eric stood up. His clothes were soaked through, including his shoes, which were wet to the socks. He picked up his bike and checked it for damage, then shot out for home, shoes squishing, hand bleeding on the handlebar.

When Eric arrived at the house, he made a pit stop in the bathroom near the kitchen. He stripped off his wet clothes and hung them on the shower rod. There was no time for a shower, so he used a damp hand towel to take off the mud and clean his scratches. He had a sudden, horrid thought of Willa and Taffy deciding that he was a lousy husband and father, deserting him, leaving him to end up alone in a terrible assisted living facility, getting a monthly sponge bath from a perfunctory nurse. He sprinted to the bedroom in his underwear and changed all of his clothes, then stopped by the bathroom again to stuff a few alcohol pads and adhesive bandages in his pocket.

As Willa had said, Taffy’s instructions were meticulously detailed, with a packing and transport checklist and a diagram of the item and how it was to be packed. He was not to open her science fair object. He was not to inhale it. He was not to expose his skin to it. Most important, he was not to eat it. He lined the cooler with ice packs, took the mysterious item from the fridge, then placed it carefully in the center of the cooler.

Eric secured the cooler to the bike and started out again, his knee and elbow aching.