The clangor of the battle had died away, the shouting of the keyboards was hushed; silence lay on the blood and coffee-stained processing floor. The bleak pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the iced windows and the snow-covered roof tops of buildings across the street struck sheens of silver from rent ID badges and broken 3 ring binders, where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken marker; coiffed heads back-drawn in the death-throes, tilted red hipster beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to the Most Interesting Man in the World, god of the hipster race.
Across the red pools and business casual-clad forms, two figures glared at each other. In that utter desolation only they moved. The frosty sky was over them, the white light reflected off the neighboring building around them, the dead men at their feet. Slowly through the corpses they came, as Monday ghosts might come to for coffee through the shambles of a weekend dead world. In the brooding silence they stood face to face.
Both were tall men, built like tigers. Their binders were gone, their work shirts battered and torn. Blood dried on their khakis. One was beardless and black-maned. His stapler stained red. The locks and beard of the other were red as the blood on the sunlit carpet. “Man,” said he, “tell me your name, so that my brothers at The Hartford may know who was the last of your team lead's band to fall before the Mavis Beacon honed skills of Steven.”
“Not at The Hartford,” growled the black-haired processor, “but in Hell will you tell your brothers that you met Carney of Marshall.”
Steven roared and leaped, and his keyboard flashed in deathly arc. Carney staggered and his vision was filled with red sparks as the singing keyboard crashed on his spiky hair, shivering into bits as letters exploded into the air. But as he reeled, Carney thrust with all the power of his broad shoulders behind the humming stapler. The sharp points of his Singer's sting tore through brass work shirt buttons and bones and heart, and the red-haired processor died at Carney’s feet.
The Marshallian stood upright, trailing his stapler, a sudden sick weariness assailing him. The glare of the sun through the windows cut his eyes like a knife and the ceiling lights seemed shrunken and strangely apart. He turned away from the trampled expanse where red-bearded Hartford processors lay locked with the analysts and processors in the embrace of death. A few steps he took, and the glare of the winter sun was suddenly dimmed. A rushing wave of blindness engulfed him and he sank down to the carpet, supporting himself on one long sleeved arm, seeking to shake the blindness out of his eyes as a lion might shake his mane.
A silvery laugh cut through his dizziness, and his sight cleared slowly. He looked up; there was a strangeness about all the office space that he could not place or define - an unfamiliar tinge to desks and lighting. But he did not think long of this. Before him, swaying like a sapling in the wind, stood a woman. Her body was like ivory to his dazed gaze, and save for a light veil of gossamer, she was naked as the day. Her slender bare feet were whiter than the snow outside. She laughed down at the bewildered warrior. Her laughter was sweeter than the rippling of silvery fountains, and poisonous with cruel mockery.
“Who are you?” asked the Marshallian. “Whence come you?”
“What matter?” Her voice was more musical than a silver-stringed harp, but it was edged with cruelty.
“Call up your men,” said he, grasping his stapler. “Yet though my strength fail me, they shall not take me alive. I see that you are of the Corporate.”
“Have I said so?” His gaze went again to her unruly locks, which at first glance he had thought to be red. Now he saw that they were neither red nor yellow but a glorious compound of both colors. He gazed spell-bound. Her hair was like elfin-gold; the office lighting struck it so dazzlingly that he could scarcely bear to look upon it. Her eyes were likewise neither wholly blue nor wholly grey, but of shifting colors and dancing lights and clouds of colors he could not define. Her full red lips smiled, and from her slender feet to the blinding crown of her billowy hair, her ivory body was as perfect as the dream of a god. Carney’s pulse hammered in his temples.
“I can not tell,” said he, “whether you are of The Hartford and mine enemy, or of ING and my friend. Far have I wandered, but a woman like you I have never seen. Your locks blind me with their brightness. Never have I seen such hair, not even among the fairest daughters of Charles Schwab. By Corporate -"
“Who are you to swear by Corporate?” she mocked. “What know you of the gods of management and meetings, you who have come from the north-east to process among an alien people?”
“By the dark gods of my own company!” he cried in anger. “Though I am not of the crimson haired Hartford, none has been more forward in office supply-play! This day I have seen four score men fall, and I alone have survived the field where Phil's reavers met the wolves of Jefferson. Tell me, woman, have you seen the flash of work shirts out across the drenched carpets, or seen armed men moving upon the tiled floor?”
“I have seen the computer monitors glittering in the sun,” she answered. “I have heard the wind whispering across the break rooms.”
He shook his head with a sigh. “Dennis should have come up with us before the battle joined. I fear he and his data entry men have been ambushed. Chad and his warriors lie dead. I had thought there was no office within many leagues of this spot, for the battle carried us far, but you can not have come a great distance over these desks and cubes, naked as you are. Lead me to your Supervisor, if you are of ING, for I am faint with blows and the weariness of strife.”
“My Supervisor is further than you can walk, Carney of Marshal,” she laughed. Spreading her arms wide, she swayed before him, her golden head lolling sensuously, her scintillant eyes half shadowed beneath their long silken lashes. “Am I not beautiful, oh man?”
“Like Dawn running naked through a call center,” he muttered, his eyes burning like those of a wolf.
“Then why do you not rise and follow me? Who is the strong processor who falls down before me?” she chanted in maddening mockery. “Lie down and die on the carpet with the other fools, Carney of the black hair. You can not follow where I would lead.”
With an oath, the Marshallian heaved himself up on his feet, his brown eyes blazing, his dark scarred face contorted. Rage shook his soul, but desire for the taunting figure before him hammered at his temples and drove his wild blood fiercely through his veins. Passion, fierce as physical agony flooded his whole being, so that floor and cubicles were red to his dizzy gaze. In the madness that swept upon him, weariness and faintness were swept away.
He spoke no word as he drove at her, fingers spread to grip her soft flesh. With a shriek of laughter she leaped back and ran, laughing at him over her white shoulder. With a low growl Carney followed. He had forgotten the fight, forgotten the business casual warriors who lay in their blood, forgotten Phil and the reavers who had failed to reach the fight. He had thought only for the slender white shape which seemed to float rather than run before him.
Out across the processing floors the chase led. The trampled red and coffee stained floor fell out of sight behind him as the stairwell door closed, but still Carney kept on with the silent tenacity of his service level. His Sketchered feet squeezed upon break room linoleum; clipped on tile floor hallways but still he fought forward through sheer strength. But the girl danced across the floor light as a feather floating across a pool; her naked feet barely left their imprint on the dark carpets or tile. In spite of the fire in his veins, the cold 68 degree office air bit through his tattered processor's business shirt and Dockers; but the girl in her gossamer veil ran as lightly: as gaily as if she danced through the palm and rose gardens of a Vegas hotel on a June day.
On and on she led, and Carney followed. Black curses drooled through the Marshallian’s parched lips. The great veins in his temples swelled and throbbed and his teeth gnashed. “You can not escape me!” he roared. “Lead me into a trap and I’ll pile the heads of your middle managers at your feet! Hide from me and I’ll tear apart your corporate headquarters to find you! I’ll follow you to hell!” Her maddening laughter floated back to him, and foam flew from his processor’s lips. Further and further into the building she led him. The floors changed; the wide plains of cubicles gave way to open floor space pock marked with wide ornate desks and long meeting tables. Far out the windows he caught a glimpse of towering building tops, hazy with the distance and white with the snows. Above these buildings shone the flaring rays of the afternoon sun.
Above him the ceiling panels glowed and crackled with strange lights and gleams. The LED bulbs shone weirdly, now frosty blue, now cinnamon crimson, now a royal silver. Through a shimmering realm of enchantment, Carney plunged doggedly onward, in an office maze where the only reality was the white body dancing across the glittering tile beyond his reach - ever beyond his reach.
He did not wonder at the strangeness of it all, not even when two gigantic figures rose up to bar his way. The collars of their white work shirts were creased sharply and freshly pressed; their hair and their glasses gleamed like mirrored ice. Grey sprinkled their manicured hair; in their beards were dabs of scented oils, their eyes were cold as the lights that streamed above them.
“Brothers!” cried the girl, dancing between them. “Look who follows! I have brought you a man to write up! Let your paperwork take his heart that we may lay it smoking on our Manager' board!”
The giants answered with roars like the grinding of coffee beans and heaved up their shining expensive pens to HR approved disciplinary forms as the maddened Marshallian hurled himself upon them. An expensive pen tip flashed before his eyes, blinding him with its brightness, and he gave back a terrible stroke of the stapler that sheared through his foe’s dress panted thigh. With a groan the victim fell, and at the instant Carney was dashed into a nearby dry erase board, his left shoulder numb from the blow of the survivor, from which the Marshallian’s own ruined work shirt had barely saved his life. Carney saw the remaining HR giant looming high above him like a colossus carved of a Men's Wearhouse catalog, etched against the silver glowing lighting. The HR pen fell, to sink through the carpet and deep into the cement of the floor as Carney hurled himself aside and leaped to his feet. The giant roared and wrenched his pen free, but even as he did, Carney’s stapler sang down. The giant’s knees bent and he sank slowly to the carpet, which turned crimson with the blood that gushed from his half- severed neck.
Carney wheeled, to see the girl standing a short distance away, staring at him in wide-eyed horror, all the mockery gone from her face. He cried out fiercely and the blood-drops flew from his stapler as his hand shook in the intensity of his passion.
“Call the rest of your brothers!” he cried. “I’ll give their hearts to the mail room wolves! You can not escape me - “
With a cry of fright she turned and ran fleetly. She did not laugh now, nor mock him over her white shoulder. She ran as for her life, and though he strained every nerve and thew, until his temples were like to burst and the floor swam red to his gaze, she drew away from him, dwindling in the witch-fire of the office lights, until she was a figure no bigger than a child, then a dancing white flame, then a dim blur in the distance. But grinding his teeth until the blood started from his gums, he reeled on, and he saw the blur grow to a dancing white flame, and the flame to a figure big as a child; and then she was running less than a hundred paces ahead of him, and slowly the space narrowed, foot by foot.
She was running with effort now, her golden locks blowing free; he heard the quick panting of her breath, and saw a flash of fear in the look she cast over her white shoulder. The grim endurance of the processor had served him well. The speed ebbed from her flashing white legs; she reeled in her gait. In his untamed soul leaped up the fires of hell she had fanned so well. With an inhuman roar he closed in on her, just as she wheeled with a haunting cry and flung out her arms to fend him off.
His stapler fell to the floor as he crushed her to him. Her lithe body bent backward as she fought with desperate frenzy in his iron arms. Her golden hair flew about his face, blinding him with its sheen; the feel of her slender body twisting in his shirted arms drove him to blinder madness. His strong fingers sank deep into her smooth flesh; and that flesh was cold as ice. It was as if he embraced not a woman of human flesh and blood, but a woman of flaming ice. She writhed her golden head aside, striving to avoid the fierce kisses that bruised her red lips.
“You are cold as the snows outside,” he mumbled dazedly. “I will warm you with the fire in my own blood-“
With a scream and a desperate wrench she slipped from his arms, leaving her single gossamer garment in his grasp. She sprang back and faced him, her golden locks in wild disarray, her white bosom heaving, her beautiful eyes blazing with terror. For an instant he stood frozen, awed by her terrible beauty as she posed naked against the glass windows.
And in that instant she flung her arms toward the lights that glowed from the ceiling above her and cried out in a voice that rang in Carney’s ears for ever after: “Stag of The Hartford! Oh, my father, save me!”
Carney was leaping forward, arms spread to seize her, when with a crack like the breaking of an office chair, the whole skies leaped into silvery LED fire. The girl’s ivory body was suddenly enveloped in a cold blue flame so blinding that the Marshallian threw up his hands to shield his eyes from the intolerable blaze. A fleeting instant, ceiling and receptionist desks were bathed in crackling white flames, blue darts of icy light, and cinnamon crimson fires. Then Carney staggered and cried out. The girl was gone. The glowing floor lay empty and bare; high above his head the witch-lights flashed and played in a tiled ceiling gone mad, and among the filing cabinets there sounded a rolling thunder as of a gigantic stag whose frantic hoofs struck lightening across the office floor.
Then suddenly the ceiling tiles, the receptionist desks and the blazing office lights reeled drunkenly to Carney’s sight; thousands of fire-balls burst with showers of sparks, and the ceiling itself became a titanic wheel which rained stars as it spun. Under his feet the patches of carpet heaved up like a wave, and the Marshallian crumpled to the floor to lie motionless.
In a cold dark universe, whose sun was extinguished eons ago, Carney felt the movement of life, alien and unguessed. An earthquake had him in its grip and was shaking him to and fro, at the same time chafing his hands and feet until he yelled in pain and fury and groped for his sword.
“He’s coming to, Jorge,” said a voice. “Haste - we must rub salve and ointments into his carpet burned limbs, if he’s ever to wield stapler again.”
“He won’t open his left hand,” growled another. “He’s clutching something - “
Carney
opened his eyes and stared into the bearded faces that bent over him.
He was surrounded by the brown faces of a cleaning crew clad in brown
uniforms.
“Carney! You live!”
“By Salvatore,” gasped the Marshallian. "Am I alive, or are we all dead and in Valhalla?"
“We live,” grunted the cleaning man, busy over Carney’s half-chaffed hands. “We had to clean our way through your leavings, or we would have met up with you before the battle was over. The corpses were scarce cold when we came upon your work several floors down. We did not find you among the dead, so we followed the bloody foot prints you left in your wake. In Upper Management’s name, Carney, why did you wander off into the wastes of the upper floors? We have followed your tracks for hours. Had another cleaning crew come up and cleaned them, we had never found you, by Management!”
“Swear not so often by Management,” uneasily muttered another cleaning worker, glancing at the empty conference rooms. “This is Their land and the gods bide among yonder cabinets and desks, the legends say.”
“I saw a woman,” Carney answered hazily. “We met Steven of Hartford's men near the call center. I know not how long we fought. I alone lived. I was dizzy and faint. The floor lay like a dream before me. Only now do all things seem natural and familiar. The woman came and taunted me. She was beautiful as a blonde flame from hell. A strange madness fell upon me when I looked at her, so I forgot all else in the world. I followed her. Did you not find her tracks? Or the giants with perfectly creased collars I slew?”
Jorge shook his head. “We found only your tracks; bloody tracks, Carney.”
“Then it may be I am mad,” said Carney dazedly. “Yet you yourself are no more real to me than was the golden-locked witch who fled naked across the floors before me. Yet from under my very hands she vanished in LED flame.”
“He is delirious,” whispered the other crewman.
“Not so!” cried an older man, whose eyes were wild and weird. “It was Sandy, the daughter of Upper Management, the Hartford Stag! To the floors of the hourly wages she comes, and shows herself to the dying! Myself when a boy I saw her, when I lay half-slain on the bloody floor of a Principle mail room. I saw her walk among the dead in the mail, her naked body gleaming like ivory and her golden hair unbearably bright in the dusky mail room light. I lay and howled like a dying dog because I could not crawl after her. She lures men from stricken battles into the waste lands of management offices to be slain by her brothers, the HR Giants, who lay men’s red hearts smoking with HR write ups. The Marshallian has seen Sandy, the Stag's daughter!”
“Bah!” grunted Jorge. “Old Frank’s mind was touched in his youth by a falling parcel to the head. That's why he cleans the very buildings he used to work in. Carney was delirious from the fury of battle - look how his spiky is dinted. Any of those blows might have addled his brain. It was an hallucination he followed into the upper floors. He is from the north east; what does he know of Sandy?”
“Carney! You live!”
“By Salvatore,” gasped the Marshallian. "Am I alive, or are we all dead and in Valhalla?"
“We live,” grunted the cleaning man, busy over Carney’s half-chaffed hands. “We had to clean our way through your leavings, or we would have met up with you before the battle was over. The corpses were scarce cold when we came upon your work several floors down. We did not find you among the dead, so we followed the bloody foot prints you left in your wake. In Upper Management’s name, Carney, why did you wander off into the wastes of the upper floors? We have followed your tracks for hours. Had another cleaning crew come up and cleaned them, we had never found you, by Management!”
“Swear not so often by Management,” uneasily muttered another cleaning worker, glancing at the empty conference rooms. “This is Their land and the gods bide among yonder cabinets and desks, the legends say.”
“I saw a woman,” Carney answered hazily. “We met Steven of Hartford's men near the call center. I know not how long we fought. I alone lived. I was dizzy and faint. The floor lay like a dream before me. Only now do all things seem natural and familiar. The woman came and taunted me. She was beautiful as a blonde flame from hell. A strange madness fell upon me when I looked at her, so I forgot all else in the world. I followed her. Did you not find her tracks? Or the giants with perfectly creased collars I slew?”
Jorge shook his head. “We found only your tracks; bloody tracks, Carney.”
“Then it may be I am mad,” said Carney dazedly. “Yet you yourself are no more real to me than was the golden-locked witch who fled naked across the floors before me. Yet from under my very hands she vanished in LED flame.”
“He is delirious,” whispered the other crewman.
“Not so!” cried an older man, whose eyes were wild and weird. “It was Sandy, the daughter of Upper Management, the Hartford Stag! To the floors of the hourly wages she comes, and shows herself to the dying! Myself when a boy I saw her, when I lay half-slain on the bloody floor of a Principle mail room. I saw her walk among the dead in the mail, her naked body gleaming like ivory and her golden hair unbearably bright in the dusky mail room light. I lay and howled like a dying dog because I could not crawl after her. She lures men from stricken battles into the waste lands of management offices to be slain by her brothers, the HR Giants, who lay men’s red hearts smoking with HR write ups. The Marshallian has seen Sandy, the Stag's daughter!”
“Bah!” grunted Jorge. “Old Frank’s mind was touched in his youth by a falling parcel to the head. That's why he cleans the very buildings he used to work in. Carney was delirious from the fury of battle - look how his spiky is dinted. Any of those blows might have addled his brain. It was an hallucination he followed into the upper floors. He is from the north east; what does he know of Sandy?”
“You speak truth, perhaps,” muttered Carney. “It was all strange and weird - by Salvatore!” He broke off, glaring at the object that still dangled from his clenched left fist; the others gaped silently at the veil he held up - a wisp of gossamer that was never spun by human hands.
Many wars and feuds did Carney fight. Honor and fear were heaped upon his name and, in time, he became a king by his own hand. But that is another story...
******
This is a spoof of the Robert E. Howard story, The Frost-Giant's Daughter. It is a Conan story about how Conan follows the daughter of a war god only to be so savage as to ruin her trap that she set for him. Several years ago, I worked at ING. I spent four years there and forged a lasting friendship. That friend is the basis for Carney. His love of Conan is legendary and I thought it fitting to place him in the lead roll of Carney the Processor.
Several of the words are Howard's that I spun into a modern day corporate building during a hostile take over of ING by The Hartford. I hope you have enjoyed reading it as much as I did creating it.
The original story can be found here: http://www.hyborien.nu/original-stories/The%20Frost-Giant's%20Daughter.pdf
