excerpt from “Yacare Caiman (Little Reptiles #7)” by Doug Dorst

. . . It started on a Monday. That much you remember clearly. The Old Man was due back from his tropical vacation, and HR had issued a reminder that he could be “mercurial” in times of transition. You’d all been on the business end of his black moods a time or ten, so by 8:30 that morning the air on the twenty-sixth floor was already spiky with fear-stink. Barb had pitted out her blouse. Malik was yanking out eyebrow hairs. Scoob was doing his gyan-mudra thing. Ted Heep’s knee was jackhammering away. Kevin was practicing smiles, in search of that sweet spot between unctuous and self-subordinating. Desirée was quailing in a bathroom stall, humming cereal-ad jingles from her childhood. Angie, the Old Man’s executive assistant, was holding up crossed fingers and intoning Tanned and rested, tanned and rested. Even Maija-Liisa, who was and maybe still is the EXVP of Market Penetration and so had less to fear than the rest of you, was in her office fussing with stress toys and looking green around the gills—so to speak. You? You were busy at the copier, trying to lose yourself in the ritual of clearing a complicated paper jam. You’ve always been good at being invisible, at blending in.

Crack of nine, the elevator bonged, and out came the Old Man.

Well, sort of. Out came someone wearing the Old Man’s khaki trench coat and brown trilby and tortoiseshell glasses, carrying a briefcase and a bag from the bagel place downstairs, walking bipedally—all of which was customary, expected. But this individual was at least a foot and a half shorter than the Old Man you were used to, and it also had the body of a mottled-brownish-black crocodile-looking thing. Stubby limbs, powerful tail, fearsome jaws, apex-predator eyes—the whole nature-doc deal.

You tried not to show surprise, fear, anything. Didn’t want to risk giving offense. Maybe this was something the Old Man couldn’t help? Like Angie’s webbed toes? Or Malik’s hair pulling? Or Kevin’s love for Ayn Rand? Or Maija-Liisa’s penchant for interrupting group conversations by saying Okay, confession time, and then recounting in rich and careful detail a recent night of sexual swashbuckling—involving, say, a tango de ocho with a traveling gaucho circus or somesuch, when the discussion had been about, say, the endless construction on the Beige Line tracks or when it might be safe to swim in Municipal Asset River again?

This new Old Man clomped past you toward his office, clumsy in his wing tips but coldly, ruthlessly watchful as he took all of you in. You tried not to focus on his claws, his teeth. The way his banded tail undulated over the checkerboard of carpet squares was mesmerizing. You felt chills.

Several of you noticed a dark spray-pattern on the bagel bag. Once the Old Man’s office door clicked shut, Ted Heep poked his head over the partition and whispered, Was that blood? and the rest of you were like, Jesus, Ted Heep, don’t say shit like that out loud.

You hunched over your personal devices, scoured the web for explanations. You shared guesses in whispers: maybe the vacation was just a cover story for an xtreme body-mod surgery? Or maybe he was getting his game face on for the VealeCorp takeover talks? Maybe he was actually at home, bedridden with island dysentery or rum tremors, and the board of directors, in their inscrutable omniscience, had recruited a mottled-brownish-black crocodile-looking thing to sub for him? But nothing truly seemed plausible, let alone satisfying.

The Old Man stayed in his office the rest of the day; meantime, there were orders to fill and markets to penetrate and paper jams to clear and xtreme customer-driven strategic power solutions to leverage, so that’s what you did. You’re still proud of that—how you all stayed cool, kept the wheels turning, upheld the Pledge of Consistency & Progress! you’d all recited from the HR binders you got on your first day here.

Angie brought the Old Man his lunch as usual, except instead of a niçoise salad from Christelle’s it was a sack full of squirming rats from PetFrenzyMax. You tried not to hear the little guys skreeting as she passed by, held your breath in the wake of rodent pee that trailed behind. Angie noticed you noticing and said loudly that nothing was wrong, everything was regular and quotidian and nonterrifying, and the Old Man was just very hungry from catching up on paperwork plus teleconferences with sales and legal and the takeover team at Lambbreaker & Sons, and shouldn’t such stalwart reliability be reassuring and not a trigger for rumors, fear, or distraction?

She had a point; a lot of things weren’t suspicious. Maija-Liisa entering his office at three to talk market-penetration strategy? Not suspicious. Her still being in there at EOB? Not entirely unheard of. You did feel her absence at the break-room birthday party for Scylla, the Gen-Z girl who ran the company’s social—she of the blue hair, tattooed ears, steel-spindled cheeks, and unnerving iconoclastic self-possession—because usually ML would drop everything and beeline to the break room when cronuts were involved. Still, though: big picture, it had pretty much turned out to be just another day.

. . .