Paragons

Issue 1- Home

The Office of Paragon Services,

Lower East Side, Manhattan

The other renters of the building had not been pleased one bit the day the strange man moved into the office on the third floor, though they did not know at the time how much worse it would become than the stairwell banister that somehow became broken in three places as he moved things in. It was about a week later that the smell began to set in, something caught between stale and rotten. The week after that it became clear that the man lived in the office, despite strict rules against such a thing, given the amount of food that was delivered to the door. Occasionally those who worked back late at night would report sounds of gunshots.

 The most infuriating part of it all was that no matter how many issues they put forward there seemed to be no way to have him or his business removed from the building, almost as if the building owner was afraid to do so. The only saving grace seemed to be that his business, whatever it may be as nobody had a clue what it was he did (the general rumour was it was simply some poorly set-up criminal front), never seemed to have a single client or visitor to block the stairwell for the actual legitimate businesses.

 Or at least there were no clients until the day the woman appeared. Her blonde hair cut short and small, pale frame cloaked in a grey hooded jacket only seemed to confirm the theories of a drug dealer front, and she certainly earned herself no friends as she shoved past reputable people on her way up the stairs with a smile so bright it could only have been built upon a base of illicit substances.

 She stopped before the door that had 'Paragon Services' scribbled onto the lid of a pizza box in Sharpie nailed to the door and rapped briskly with her knuckles upon the wood. Her blue eyes turned toward a balding head that poked out from 'West and West', the small law firm the next door down. She flashed a white smile and the head disappeared like a prairie dog down its hole.

 She gave a small snort as her attention turned back toward the door. She knocked again, loud enough that the sound carried down the corridor. This time she waited a single beat and once there was again no answer from within she grasped and twisted the handle, and the door swung open before her.

 The smell hit her like a wall. It was noticeable outside, the scent of something gone terribly wrong, but it turned out that door did a damn fine job of containment. It seemed most likely that the smell originated with the piles of fast food containers that littered the office in small mountains of excessive consumerism, though she still did not dismiss the idea that she would discover a bloated corpse beneath the buckets that had once held fried chicken. She was curious to know what creatures had taken up residence in the unique ecosystem; a colony of rats within the largest pile of trash and a legion of roaches that would march across every surface once the sun had set.

 She was rather disappointed in herself that she had made it almost halfway across the fast-food graveyard before she had noticed the figure slumped over the desk piled with envelopes and paper; it seemed to her that every piece of paper was torn or ruined in some fashion while every envelope was still sealed. Amidst all the paper sat a two-slice toaster, it's metal body suspiciously shiny.

 She contemplated her options if that did turn out to be a corpse before her, chief among her plans was to simply set the entire building ablaze and act as though she had never set foot there, only to dismiss those thoughts as she found the body rose and fell with each breath it took.

 Her eyes moved over the pale form of the man as he slumbered, now that she was but a few feet away. It was clear that he had not set foot into sunlight in some time, nor had he done much to care for the beard that had grown wild yet inconsistently across his face. It seemed that the only thing that had been well kept in the entire place was his head, which appeared to have been shaved within the past day or so. A long brown duster jacket was draped across his back like a cheap blanket, and she found that his head rested upon a black cowboy hat, now crushed beneath the weight of his cranium.