Agency
an excerpt

“Timber!” the man screamed, knocking down another tall stack of boxes that narrowly missed Sam’s leg. He looked a bit crazed, and she tried not to stand with her back to him while she worked, though that meant she couldn’t clearly see what the other two yellow-cream suits were doing. Both of them were tired-looking women a few years older than Sam, with short, graying hair and intense frowns on their faces. They were intensely scanning the labels on the other side of the room, and were rearranging them and selecting boxes to shred. They were slow and steady. Sam could feel their determination occupying most of the space on their side of the room.

The shredding continued for five hours without rest. Sam knew she was entitled to a lunch break, and had a lunch bar in her pocket, plus a small water bottle in her waistpack, but there was clearly no hope of stopping. Her supervisors continued their panicked pace, and she kept up with them. She could have worked a little faster, but despite the urgency of the situation, she paced the man who had spoken to her, even as he tired: she didn’t want to be scolded for trying to ‘show up’ someone of higher rank, even a mere yellow-cream suit. And so it continued, hour after hour. She began to tire, unaccustomed to such heavy lifting, and her upper arms began to feel hollow.

An alarm went off, a long, wailing siren that wavered every 25 seconds, and Sam froze, wondering if she would be allowed to evacuate along with everyone else down the fire steps in the main building, or if she would be sent back to the little beige room to wait for a rescue that might never come...

“SHRED!” the man yelled, and Sam’s heart skipped a beat, then two. She looked at him, and then continued, at a slightly slower pace, with the alarms screeching overhead. The alarm stopped as abruptly as it started, and a voice that sounded like Butter the Gladiator’s came across a public address system. “Authorities have entered the building, they are in the elevator headed your way. They will arrive in approximately three minutes.” And then the sirens stopped. There was a painful, high-pitched tone that replaced, and Sam wondered when it would stop before she realized that her ears were ringing.

“SHRED! SHRED!” the man screamed again, this time with a tone that made Sam fear for her safety, and she picked up her pace slightly to surpass his, again gathering boxes that he’d knocked to the floor. Sam had to take some extra time to pick up the papers that had spilled out of broken boxes, until she noticed him shaking his head. He stopped toppling boxes in favor of operating the grinder on the machine, pulping the paper and boxes that had so frantically been thrown in. The resulting fizzy, acidic pulp was noisily pumped out of the main bin through an enclosed section of the machine and into tall barrels at the opposite end from where Sam was dumping paper. It looked like the last barrel was ready to overflow, but that was not Sam’s concern. She kept an eye on her supervisor as she continued her sweaty labor, but somehow failed to notice when the two women working behind her left the room.

Butter’s voice came over the intercom again. “They are here” was all it growled. And suddendly, the pair of doors Sam had been led through at the far end of the room were violently thrown open, there were shouts, and Sam had the experience of being tazed into unconcsiousness for the second time in her life.

*

Sam started to regain conciousness during a heated argument directly over her body, but thought better of it, and sunk down into oblivion again.