The Bureaucrat Read online

  A story for anyone who has ever wanted to burn down a call center.

  Libby Frower loves crushing veterans’ hopes and dreams.

  Libby Frower works at the VA pharmacy. She decides whether former soldiers get their prescriptions…or not.

  But Libby Frower had better watch out.

  Tonight, she’s going to get a taste of her own medicine.

  Short story

  The Bureaucrat

  An Uncanny Tale

  by Danielle Williams

  Published 2017

  © Copyright 2017 Danielle Williams

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Pixelvania Publishing.

  This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Dedicated to the veterans who have fallen between the cracks.

  “Now serving…N. 9. 3. 0. 1.”

  Libby Frower, 43, looked up at the couple who had just entered her booth. The vet had a pot belly like most of them did, and needed a haircut. The wife looked to be in better shape, with thick curls in her blonde hair, but she was also a little rotund, with a glum set to her mouth. Paunch and Moody. They were eating enough, so why’d they need to use the VA pharmacy for medications?

  Probably trying to game the system, thought Libby.

  “You can have a seat right there.” She indicated a wooden chair with a dull blue cushion, but neither of them took it. She pulled the ticket up on the computer. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the wife pulling a notepad out of her purse like she was some kind of reporter.

  Libby smirked. As long as her butt was in this chair Monday through Friday, 9AM to 4PM, she couldn’t be fired. But the wife could write whatever she wanted on that notepad. Maybe there was only a pea-brain housed beneath those luxurious curls. Maybe her memory sucked.

  Libby skimmed the ticket. “Here for a prescription rewrite?”

  They nodded.

  “We tried to buy the prescriptions at the pharmacy by our house, but the stent medication is $300. We can’t afford it,” said the veteran.

  Libby glanced at him. He was wearing flip flops.

  Maybe it was true. Maybe it wasn’t. She didn’t care. She was outta here in 20 minutes.

  “I’ll need to see your papers,” she said.

  He pulled out a note from the ER doc down the hall. She skimmed this as well. Admitted to the civilian hospital a couple days ago for chest pain, heart cath showed a 90% blockage, a stent was inserted…

  She glanced again at his gut. Service-related. Sure. Try eating a salad, big boy.

  The vet scratched his beard, adjusted his red cap. She went back to reading.

  Bla bla bla there were four other meds he had to be on now, according to the civilian cardiologist. She named them off out loud in confirmation.

  They nodded. Yes, those were what they needed.

  Libby smiled at them. “We’ll call you up when they’re ready.”

  When their backs were turned, she checked her watch-slash-pedometer.

  15 more minutes.

  * * *

  When they returned they both smiled at the white paper bag sitting on Libby’s desk. This time, the husband took the seat. The wife leaned past him, digging through the bag while Libby went through the spiel about refills being handled by mail. When Libby was done, the nosy wife held up the bag.

  “Is the stent medicine in here? There’s only three bottles in here.”

  Oh, so you can count!

  “We don’t have that medication in stock right now. It’s on order and will be here in a couple days, then we’ll mail it to you.” She smiled in a finalizing way. 10 more minutes to go.

  “By what day?” said the wife.

  “A couple.”

  “So…Thursday? Friday?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know, ma’am.”

  The wife looked at her husband. “The doctor said he needs to start on it right away. Is there any way the prescription can be sent to our pharmacy? They have it there—I left it behind when I saw the price.”

  “We’re on a closed system, ma’am. Once it’s approved, it’ll be sent to you.”

  They both bristled.

  “You just said it wasn’t here, now you’re saying it has to be approved first? Which is it?” said the vet.

  Shoot! Shoulda kept your mouth shut, Libby! 8 more minutes to go.

  “Our anti-coagulation board has to approve it first. There may be other things they want to try.” Like Jenny Craig.

  “Since when do pharmacists get to question doctors’ orders?” said the wife.

  “It’s the way our system works, ma’am.”

  The wife leaned down to her husband’s ear, but the booth was small and the noise in the atrium outside wasn’t loud enough to drown out her whisper.

  “Should we go upstairs to the patient advocate?”

  Libby smiled. “They just closed for lunch, ma’am.”

  The wife looked up. “How long is lunch?”

  Libby kept smiling. “An hour.”

  The wife pinched the bridge of her nose, looking pained, but the husband’s shoulders just slumped.

  Looks like somebody knows who pays the advocates’ salaries.

  The notebook and pen were out again. “OK,” said the wife with measured courtesy. “When will we know if he’s been approved?”

  3 more minutes. Shoot, if she hadn’t slipped, she’d be to her car by now. If you weren’t pulling out of the VA hospital parking lot right at break time, you’d be stuck in traffic. And if Libby was stuck in traffic, the Subway guys wouldn’t be able to make her a meatball sub to carry home and she’d have to drop by after work, too!

  “By tomorrow,” said Libby.

  The wife scribbled something.

  “Okay,” she said. “And who can I follow up with about that?”

  “Linda,” said Libby. She wasn’t going to make it! Meddler! “You’ll have to go through our call center first.” She reached for a paper to give to them. Hopefully that’d satisfy the porker.

  This time the husband shook his head. “Devon from the ER told us how to do that,” he said.

  Libby returned her hand to the keyboard. “Great. Anything else I can help you with?”

  “Let me just confirm,” said the wife. She read off the notepad. “We’ll know if he’s been approved sometime tomorrow and I can call Linda about it. What’s her last initial?”

  Oh, you think you’re so good.

  “G,” Libby improvised. “Linda G.” There was no such person there, but the wife hadn’t gotten Libby’s name. By the time they figured it out, it wouldn’t be Libby’s problem anymore.

  “Linda G.,” repeated the wife. The vet frowned at Libby like he suspected what she was up to, but Libby just smiled back. He might have killed men when he was active duty—though with his physique he probably just drove trucks—but right now he couldn’t do a thing to her. She was sitting on the right side of the desk, and he wasn’t.

  And he couldn’t go postal on her, either. Libby believed in the power of the No Firearms signs posted at the entrances. At least, she believed it worked in combination with these docile old warriors. Didn’t know how to think for themselves, not after years of taking orders, is how she thought of it.

  “Thanks,” said the wife. She bunched the top of the white medications bag with her fist, once, twice. The vet stood, silent.
He was a tall man, maybe was scary once.

  The wife was halfway out the door.

  Libby was mentally urging the vet to follow, but instead, he looked her dead in the eye. He was staring—no, not staring. It was like he was trying to examine her from the inside out, like he wanted to crawl into her eyes and root around inside her head.

  “Ma’am,” he said, “do you know what happens to liars in the army?”

  She kept the plastic smile on. “No, sir!” she chirped.

  “They get what they deserve,” he said.

  “How interesting!”

  He didn’t say anything for a while. Libby held his stare, keeping the smile on.

  Ugh! Can’t you just leave already?

  Seconds passed. Libby might have used the wall clock to figure out how many had passed, but the clock had broken down six years ago and had never been replaced. Business as usual at the VA.

  “Now serving…X. 8. 2. 5. 5,” said the screen outside.

  She turned back to her computer. The vet pushed himself to his feet. She listened as the thwacking of his flip flops faded, then disappeared.

  He was gone.

  Libby pushed the button to close off her booth from the atrium.

  Finally!

  * * *

  Since she hadn’t gotten her Subway, Libby had to make do with a frozen pizza for dinner. She ate the entire thing binge-watching episodes of The Office. The US one with Steve Carrell. That man was a hoot!

  When she happened to look at the clock, it was already 11:37.

  “Damn.” Blew her bedtime again. She was trying to get in bed before midnight on workdays. She tossed the trash in the sink and went to bed. She’d take care of it in the morning, or after work tomorrow. Wasn’t like anyone came up here anyway.

  She set the thermostat to low and crawled into the covers. Her eyes grew heavy and her breathing slowed. In the drifting place between dreams and wakefulness, she relived a childhood memory of jumping off her wooden scooter onto the ground. Her knees flinched when she landed, waking her up.

  Her eyes flew open, but her blue-curtained bedroom and the TV in it were gone. Instead, Libby stood before a monumental gap between two featureless, concrete walls.

  Entrance, read a paper taped to the wall near her. It looked like something someone had printed off in a hurry. Two hyphens and a greater-than sign formed a crude arrow pointing to the gap.

  Libby checked left, right. The walls seemed to go on forever. Behind her was another wall, darker in color. It curved out of sight, parallel to the walls in front of her.

  “Bizarro,” she said aloud. The air absorbed her words in a way that made her think of talking into a pillow.

  “BIZARRO!” she shouted.

  No echo. She looked around again. No one in sight, but if there was someone in here with her, they probably wouldn’t be able to hear her shouting.

  A dull whumm whumm sounded from somewhere above, and then the air turned on. The sign fluttered.

  She checked the pedometer at her wrist. It had GPS in it, maybe it could tell her where she was. She tapped it.

  A green ouroboros spun and spun…Connection to satellite could not be made.

  “Lousy piece of junk.”

  She looked up again at the entrance before her.

  Libby was a woman who took elevators, escalators, and people movers at every opportunity. She never even considered trying to walk the perimeter of the walls.

  She marched into the entrance, sensible office shoes thudding as she went.

  Striding down the first hall was like being back in elementary school again. Long-buried instructions floated to the top of her subconscious, and she folded her arms in obedience to them. Hall monitors at her school had been real Nazis!

  This hall went straight ahead for some time. Maybe it’s a straight shot through, she thought. Entrance to exit. She turned her stride into a speed walk, hugging her arms close. I wonder if there’s anything to eat at the end? So far there was nothing here, no sign of litter or graffiti. Not even pigeons, though she guessed the air-conditioning meant she couldn’t be outdoors. Besides, something about the steady but dim lighting made her feel like she was definitely indoors.

  A glance up showed the walls towering so high she couldn’t tell where they ended and the ceiling began.

  She reached the end of the long hall. The way ahead of her split into two paths, one curving to the left, one curving to the right.

  She’d read somewhere that most people turned right at theme parks, so if you wanted to avoid crowds, you should go left. But if there was going to be any help here, it’d be with people, so Libby chose the right-hand path.

  It wasn’t long before the right hand path forked again. Libby grunted, irked. So much for her straight shot. She turned left, irritated. The elementary school instincts evaporated and she charged down the path with clenched fists. At the next fork, she turned left again, and though the one after that had three branches, she picked the right-hand one out of spite.

  This should just be a straight shot, why does this have to be so complicated?

  The gray walls were so featureless and the light made them so flat that she walked straight into the dead end.

  She swore, holding her nose between two tented fingers. Did she break it?! She dabbed beneath her nose with a finger and looked at it. No blood.

  Reassured, she allowed herself to resume her anger at the pain, cussing the wall under her breath. Even surrounded on three sides by concrete, her voice didn’t echo.

  Only a giant, distant CLANK made her stop.

  “What was that?”

  The floor dropped out from beneath her.

  Libby shrieked, but the fall wasn’t far. Her knees buckled, then she bounced once on her tailbone before sliding the rest of the way down the incline into pitch blackness.

  Air roared past. What, was it covered in oil? No way she could be moving this fast!

  She slammed her palms down, trying to brake, but although there was no oil slicking the bottom of the slide, her hands generated no friction.

  A gray shape ahead, coming up fast…

  WHUMP.

  The slide threw Libby out onto her knees. She stopped screaming and opted to rest there a moment, catching her breath.

  When the panic finally subsided, she looked up.

  Entrance. The same stupid typed arrow.

  She looked around. Was she back where she started?

  She got up and began feeling the wall around the sign. It felt the same. Not that that made any logical sense, she knew, but it was the only thing she could check to see if anything had changed.

  She brushed off her skirt and went inside again. She sped walk again through the straight hall, crossing her arms again, pinching and pulling the sleeves of her black cardigan over and over again.

  I must have taken the wrong path. I’ll pick the left one this time. That’ll get me out.

  She reached the end of the straight hall. The left-hand path curved away, mirroring the right’s progression. Libby grinned when she came to the first fork. The branch to the left had a giant “1” painted on it, while the one on the other side had a “2”.

  “One,” she said, and followed the path. She tapped her first finger on her thigh as she walked. If she got sent back again, she might have to remember it.

  “One…one…one…one…oh!”

  The hall suddenly turned into a wide rectangle, presenting a bank of four new paths before her, each numbered from left to right. On the floor just past each numbered threshold was a white and black striped line, like a piece of caution tape that had lost its yellow hue.

  Libby’s hand went to her mouth. She gnawed a nail, looking over her choices. Could she get away with just picking “1” again? It’d be easy to remember…

  She really had no way of knowing. She got the feeling, though, that no path went to the same place. She was put into the mind of the subway lines she’d ridden as a teen back East.

  “They co
uld at least be a color or something.”

  She went with number 3, as close as she could get to a straight shot from the hall behind her. If it didn’t work out, she could always retrace her steps and come back. The four-way room was landmark enough.

  The moment her foot crossed the colorless caution tape, there was an enormous SLAM!, like a stone falling over on its face. Libby shrieked and hopped a one-eighty in the air.

  A wall had dropped behind her, sealing off the path. She swore again and again. That wasn’t supposed to happen!

  She attacked the corners of the blockade with her fingers, thinking to pry apart a weak spot, thinking maybe the corners weren’t as sealed as they looked, but it was in vain. If she hadn’t been there when it had closed, she would have thought it another dead end.

  “Fine,” she snarled. She stomped further down the third path, muttering curses.

  Some three thousand steps later—her dumb pedometer was helping her keep track—the path branched off in two opposite directions, labeled “1” on the left, “2” on the right.

  She groaned, then took the left path. One, three, one. At least it wasn’t one, three anymore. Unlucky thirteen! What had she been thinking?

  As she walked, the path took a corner, then another one in the same direction. She froze in place. Her sense of direction had never been the best—she still got turned around in shopping malls she’d been frequenting for years—but she felt like the path was doubling back on itself. But was it true, or just her poor sense of direction kicking in?

  She backed up slowly. No wall had fallen when she’d chosen this path. She went back to the intersection.

  “Three, one, two.”

  Another dead end.

  This time while she stared at the blank face, the mechanical clank, distant but distinct, registered in her ear. She turned and tried flinging herself back the way she came, but only managed to land on her stomach as the floor turned into a Teflon-coated slide.

  She slid back to the entrance on her belly.

  She stood for five minutes screaming curses at the entrance, then barreled down the long hall again. “One, three, one! One, three, one!”

  Screw her sense of direction. She took the path she’d shied away from before. The path doubled up again and again like a game of Snake. She was so furious that the dead end didn’t even register. The floor disappeared from beneath her mid-stride.