Ex-Purgatory by Peter Clines (best book club books TXT) 📕

He slipped off his jacket and clipped on his ID. The jacket went into his locker and the tool belt came out. A few moments later he was getting his assignments from Jarvis. The shift boss had a dark beard shot through with white and silver.

The first two hours of George’s day were spent replacing fluorescent lights in one of the labs. There’d been a power surge and three dozen tubes had blown out. Someone else had swept up all the broken glass, but he was stuck pulling out the jagged ends and installing new lights. It was slow work, but at least the halls were empty and he wasn’t working around wandering students. Afterward he mopped the hallway to get any last fragments of glass or the chalky powder from inside the tubes. He didn’t mind the mopping. He thought of it as a very Zen activity, although he was pretty sure he wasn’t using Zen the right way when he thought that.

Just before lunch was a broken sprinkler head. Someone had kicked it or hit it or something a few days ago, and now it was shooting a jet of water right at one professor’s window in the chemistry building. He’d complained two days ago and his complaint had filtered through the system and become an item George’s boss assigned to him.

George poked and pulled at the sprinkler for about ten minutes before deciding to just replace it. A year or two back the sprinklers would’ve been groundskeeping’s problem, but budget cuts had trimmed some departments and merged others. He still didn’t know enough about the system to do fine repairs, so he had to go for big ones.

Lunch was a rectangular pizza slice with orange sauce and soft crust. He was pretty sure the pepperoni crumbles were just flavored soy meat. He’d read that once on the back of a frozen pizza box. The salad that came with the pizza wasn’t much more than lettuce and dressing. He ate them both and read through the first few pages of a newspaper someone had left in the cafeteria. He had a glass of chocolate milk for dessert.

After lunch he went back to the sprinkler and installed the new one. There was a sheet of instructions in the box that helped. Nothing leaked or shook, so he called it done. He packed the soil back around the sprinkler and looked around while he wiped his hands on his Dickies.

He’d caught the lull when all the parents took their kids out for lunch one last time before heading home. The campus was dead. A few grad students stumbled between buildings and across the lawns, still hungover from welcome-back parties the night before. The lawn was overgrown, he noticed. More grounds-keeping cuts. He’d mention it to Jarvis and volunteer to take care of it.

There was a poster on a nearby bus stop for a clothing store. George had never been into fashion, but something about the poster caught his eye. A blonde and a brunette flanked a stunning woman with dark skin and ebony hair. They all wore half-buttoned shirts and tight pants. The dark-skinned woman was barefoot. She looked familiar, and George was pretty sure she was the current “name” celebrity supermodel.

He just couldn’t remember her name.

His Nextel walkie chirped. “George, you there?”

He pulled it free from his belt. “Yeah, what’s up, Jarvis?”

“Bad news, m’friend. Somebody just broke a lobby window over at Birch Hall.”

“How the hell’d they do that?”

“Backed an SUV into it trying to get close to the door,” said Jarvis. “You drew the short straw.”

“Dammit.”

“Sorry. Mark’s grabbing some plywood. He’ll meet you over there and y’all can get it cleaned up.”

George kept his finger off the button and sighed. Mark was a new hire this year. He’d been some level of film producer or development person—George wasn’t sure which—who’d been let go after the economy started to dive and his last three movies in a row had tanked. After eighteen months of looking for work, the man had bitten the bullet and taken a job on the maintenance staff of his alma mater.

On one level, George admired the man for being able to swallow his pride. On another level, though, he couldn’t stand listening to him complain about “how far he’d fallen” and the constant comments about “life at the bottom.” In fact, George was pretty sure he was going to have firm words with Mark about it sometime soon.

After all, this was his life. He didn’t need to listen to anyone badmouthing it.

GEORGE WIGGLED HIS fingers and settled his glove a little better on his hand. He reached up and grabbed the curved piece of glass. It was stuck in the frame of the big wall-to-ceiling window. The jagged point at the end made it look vaguely like an Arabian sword, one of the ones from the old Sinbad movies. A scythe? A scimitar. It was like a glass scimitar was buried in the frame.

Half the window had broken away. A collection of other glass swords and spikes hung in the window frame now, each a foot or two long. George had been doing this job long enough to know some kid—young adult—would end up stepping through the opening in the rush of moving day. And once one of them did, it would become a new doorway. At least, until someone got cut. Or worse. So his first priority was getting all the glass out of the frame.

He’d set up a few cones and signs from the dorm’s supply closet and leaned a broom across them as a low barrier, but there were just too many people for it to do anything. A few hundred students were trying to move into the building, and most of them had at least one other person helping. There were close to a dozen bodies within five feet of his ladder at that moment.

The half-dozen shards on the ground had been easy.