Read Temping Is Hell for Free Online Page B

thing, though, was every now and then she’d come across a signature in English, sometimes with a thumbprint in dark brown ink.
    After a few hours, her eyes were crossing, and she was feeling even more cranky and violent than usual on a corporate temp job.
    “This is ridiculous, Slim. You know that.” She rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her palms. “There’s got to be an easier way.”
    He shrugged, still blissed out from the Ho Hos. “We do what we’re told.”
    She shook her head. “What if you don’t find any of them?”
    “We will find them.”
    “But if it takes too long…”
    He looked worried as her sentence trailed off. “Many of these others don’t understand,” he said in a whisper, nodding at the rest of the men bent over the papers. “They think it couldn’t possibly be worse here than it was, back where we were,” he prevaricated. “But I know the Overseer. I know what he is capable of. He told us his job is at stake—that it will depend on our performance. And I think we’d better find at least one name soon, or it will…”
    He paused, that look of panic and fear back on his face.
    “. . . be very bad,” he finished softly.
    This “Overseer” guy sounded like more than just a micromanager. He sounded like a prime, brutal, abusive asshole.
    “You know, I’ve met Thomas Kestrel a couple of times…” Kate said.
    “No!” Slim said, then quickly dropped his voice lower when others looked at them. “No. It would only make things worse.”
    Kate sighed. She wasn’t going to go narc on this Overseer guy—she didn’t know him, and obviously the guys were scared stiff. That said, she could help them find the names. She might not exactly be a caped crusader, but she knew paperwork, and she knew systems.
    Besides, Maggie had just told her to come down here and “fix” stuff. She hadn’t really limited how that stuff was supposed to get fixed.
    Kate smiled. More than just paperwork and systems, she knew people.
    And one in particular, she thought with a grimace, would probably be just what the situation called for… as long as he kept his hands to himself.
    …
    “Well, that was an utter failure,” Thomas said with a long sigh.
    It was five o’clock when Thomas was able to check in on his little “circumvent Al” experiment. The twelfth floor of Fiendish Headquarters was full of empty offices and conference rooms—and a prison, not that anybody needed to know that.
    The I.T. guy he’d recruited was at the desk in one of those unused offices. His name was Pablo Escrima, and he was now passed out, unconscious, face down on the keyboard. The scanner next to him hummed almost sinisterly.
    “How long did he last?” Thomas asked Yagi.
    The ordinarily composed Yagi wiped at his sweat-beaded forehead with a handkerchief. “Six hours,” he said, putting his suit jacket back on.
    “Six hours,” Thomas echoed. “And he got through how many documents?”
    “About a hundred.” Yagi poked at the prone man. “He started showing irritability at two hours, psychosis at four. Any longer than six, he’d be dead.”
    “We should’ve stopped at four,” Thomas ground out. If he hadn’t been in meetings, he’d have seen it and stopped it earlier. He might have signed his soul to the Devil’s team, but that didn’t mean he had to keep earning bonus cruelty points.
    Yagi shrugged. “He’s young; he’ll survive. And he won’t remember a thing.”
    “I really wanted this to work. We’re cutting it too close,” Thomas answered. “We’ve got thousands of these documents, Yagi. For the demons to skim through each page, even with fifty of them… It’s taking too long.”
    “Al,” Yagi replied. “He’s the bottleneck. As long as he’s in control of them, he’s got job security—and a fifty-year guarantee of a sanctuary from those who would do worse than kill him. He’ll give you just enough to keep you from kicking him out, but he’s not going to allow you the chance