The Girl Who Kept Running

5. The Girl Who was in the Eye of the Bull

Dedicated to Jagermeanshunter for suggesting the wonderfully mischievous name for the 'men' introduced in this chapter.

23 September, 2050

I hate this shit.

Nicklaus Zallago reserved all his big words for work. Apart from his job, he was a simple man of short straight sentences.

The situations his work involved him in often pushed him toward opening up his dams but he resisted. If he wasn't careful, big, ugly geysers of sweaty, meaty words that were boiling under the surface would break out. Something his dear old abuela would harshly admonish against.

Keep the lid tight, he repeated for the third time since bringing the bike on the highway. His Harlow, as he liked to call her, was zooming across the Corkscrew Freeway toward Ave Maria - a latter day boomtown where his office had opened a new branch.

"This work has none of the mafia crap," his brother Ermolai had said when Nicklaus was faced with a choice for his future. A mafia thug - didn't matter Russian or Italian, they were all the same in the nitty-gritty - or a lowly bookkeeper for Freddy Booker that would never take him nowhere.

Nicklaus may have ruined his reputation in school by punching a snivelly but physically weaker kid who was preying on the fear of another closeted bookish boy. But he often took great pains to hide the fact that he was a softie at heart and secretly a nerd who loved the hypnotic monotony of addition and subtraction.

And he didn't like talking rudely in people's faces.

In another forty minutes, Nicklaus had arrived at the flat modernized barn that had been recently converted to their office after the farmer went bankrupt. Nicklaus's agency, looking to expand, got it on the cheap. From the inside now, it looked like a spacious hallway with different sections of the office separated by nice stretches of empty space.

Nicklaus reached his desk and logged his activity and progress since nine in the morning. He was coming from his sixth 'visit'. Before him, there had been two late payment collections, one mortgage defaulter, one long session with a small-time landlord who was being lax about his commission splits and one case of an old defaulter from Jacksonville showing up by the coast.

Shit.

An internal message had popped up in the lower right corner of his screen, meaning he'll have to go into the darkest section of the barn - IT. His stubby fingers must have made a keying mistake in the last day's logbook needing to be cleared up.

As he made his way to the IT corner and stepped around the wooden screen, he found quite a group of people there including his team that he usually went out to with in the afternoons and his branch supervisor. They seemed to be arguing about something with their best techie, an energetic, casually dressed young man. The techie went by with one of those ridiculously made-up names of what they all insisted on calling the v-age: MarauderI-95.

"What is going on here?" he blurted.

Some of his buddies shrugged while another IT guy, a lean Indian in a baseball cap and loose t-shirt, waved him in. "Oh, I called you up."

As Nicklaus sauntered over to the guy's terminal and helped him sort out and correct the mistakes, the argument restarted behind him.

"I don't see what's to be so stuck up about this, Maud." Rufus Kaase was swinging his keychain around his forefinger as he goaded the techie, using the more mature sounding name they had all settled on for MarauderI-95.