By Scott McNee
We were in the loading bay fitting a crate of sifaka lemur cadavers into one of the truck trailers when Team Leader’s order came through on the walkie.
There is a leg in the freezer. Dispose of it before nightshift.
Team Leader communicated almost exclusively through walkie. On the rare occasions we saw her, she would stand on the grate flooring above us in storage, still talking through the walkie and twisting the heels of her work boots to emphasise her words.
In the freezer, the leg emerged from the far wall, stretching out and over the crates of milk bottles, yoghurt pots and vacuum-packed horse meat. It was segmented, multiple joints crooking and straightening as we watched, letting out a gentle sound akin to twigs snapping underfoot. It ended on a sort of rudimentary wrist (or ankle, we never quite agreed) from which a small nub of a toeless foot the size of a human head rotated aimlessly, as if in search of the floor it had not quite reached.
“It’s like a spider’s leg,” said Hilliker, the new hire.
I thought this was useless speculation—to narrow in on the similarities to a spider’s leg, you would have to ignore the similarities to a devil’s coach horse beetle, to mannequins, to people.
Among ourselves, we debated the best way to proceed, not wishing to ask guidance from Team Leader, who had previously been unreceptive to such familiarities. Our discussions were frequently interrupted by the intrusions of those tasked with stocking the freezer, who wheeled in more product without interest in the leg that had shattered their workspace. Every so often I would become aware of one of the janitors peering into the freezer as well, his leering wooden mask presenting a significant risk to morale. Each time I chased him off he would flee a shorter distance.
Hilliker was the first to examine the leg and inadvertently demonstrated that, even through gloves, with the lightest touch, the chitinous hairs penetrated flesh and bone. We were all immensely grateful to her.
Fenwick the key holder drew his box-cutter across the carapace, which created a rattling sound like a leaf-blower failing its ignition sequence. The blade was useless thereafter, coated with a thick brown resin that could not be removed.
It was my idea to chip at the tiles from which the leg protruded. This initially showed progress, the cracked tile swiftly dropping at the repeated careful tapping of a hammer, though each volunteer was forced to ascend the ladder with head bowed, as even hardhats proved useless against the hairs drooping down and wavering as if in a soft breeze. After several precarious hours, we discovered that the leg was coming from beyond the tiles, the brickwork beneath and possibly from the exterior of the warehouse itself.
Fenwick was so disturbed by this that he misspoke, suggesting that a volunteer should leave the building and determine the leg’s source. “There,” he said, “it might connect to a body.”
He eventually registered our expressions and realised the terrible weight of his unprecedented suggestion. I radioed Team Leader and had him removed. She added a condition, likely as startled by Fenwick’s outburst as us: No one in your team is to approach the loading bay. Being the warehouse’s only exit, she must have feared the idea might catch hold and lead some astray.
I risked a question to Team Leader; was there a possibility that the leg connected to a torso of some kind?
She replied. The relationship between the leg and the body is irrelevant. We are concerned with the relationship between the leg and the freezer, which is not a body according to our extensive documentation. Dispose of it before nightshift.
I discerned from this that the leg was growing from the freezer itself, which was neither helpful nor comforting.
Our dilemma continued. The freezer, once vacated by its roll containers and their held products, was spacious enough to admit a forklift, but on contact with the leg the forklift proved as useful as the boxcutter. The aftermath was even more detrimental, as the leg’s resin rendered the vehicle stuck so completely to the floor that to remove it would require an industrial crane and the absence of the warehouse’s ceiling.
Hilliker began to sprout hairs like that of the leg, first from the maimed section of her arm but eventually all over. When they began to sprout from her face, and eye-sockets in particular, her speech became nothing more than an irritable whimper. She sat in the opposite corner of the freezer from the leg and did little work. After a while, we observed that the hairs had tangled and hardened over her shrivelled form, and she did even less work after that.
The impending deadline of the nightshift worried me. I took to wandering the warehouse’s more desolate corners, clambering between pallet racks, over the scree, shaligrams, and shopping trolleys in search of some forgotten tool that might have been designed with the purpose of the leg’s disposal. In aisle 160-Q, sheltering from a bitter northerly-southerly, I encountered a produce manager who suggested dismantling the leg by levering equipment into the joints and prying it apart like a lobster. This was attempted and the debris from our shattered tools rendered several of us unfit for hours more. At some point during this farce, the janitors arrived to inform us that Hilliker had been made redundant—they carried her off on their shoulders, and we did our best not to look.
Fenwick returned, freshly chastised. He became more reliable as a worker, though on breaks he withdrew from the group, embarrassed by the alterations to his diet and digestive tract. I have often tried to parse the logic behind the chastisements doled out by our employers, but I have been unable to figure out the correlation between the transgression and its associated punishment. For instance, I recall that when Null fell asleep on shift, she returned from her employee review with cropped ears like a Dobermann, which has yet to have any impact on her narcolepsy as far as I am informed. Despite Fenwick’s return, our order to stay far from the loading bay was not rescinded—our replacements in those duties continued to glare at us with a great deal of malice whenever they passed the freezer.
In any case, his presence allowed me to delegate duties. The leg’s implacability was unlikely to serve as a satisfactory explanation to our employers or even Team Leader. It seemed to me that the issue had galvanised a change in our work—in my moments of pause, I began to perceive a sickly yellow light from beyond the loading bay, where workers with pockmarked faces like sun-bleached driftwood leapt from trailer to trailer and called to one another in burbling, drowned voices. I sat down on a pile of discarded, upturned pots and tried to organise my life back to its former coherence.
A change in duties should be an inconvenience at worst. Never before had I felt myself confronted with an impossible task—I would have thought that reflected my competence or the trust placed in me. I wanted to believe that this was change—that all of my tasks before served a singular purpose, chiefly because money alone is not compensation enough for abstraction.
Such interiority cost me much of the time I had left. To seriously consider your work is like remembering the tongue in your mouth and becoming aware of its wriggling grotesqueness. Marriages work in much the same way.
I went to storage, where I felt my way through the aisles, following Team Leader’s shambling progress from below until I stood beneath her. The fluorescent lights that haloed her crackled with an unsettling intensity, as if the glass was moments from shattering.
“I don’t understand,” I said, calling up. “We don’t have the equipment for the task at hand. The leg won’t move.” Were I braver and capable of facing life beyond the loading bays, I might have threatened to quit.
She ground her heels into the grating, flaking rust down into my beard and dress suit. I heard her make a singular communication through her walkie, which did not come through on my channel. She was answered by a distinct scraping sound that seemed to satisfy her. After a while, I realised that she had quite forgotten me, so I returned to my group.
Fenwick stood by the cocooned forklift, gazing up at the leg. He gestured at the empty space once occupied by crates and trolleys. “This room exists to contain a leg now. If it were growing outwards rather than inwards, we would have no issue.”
I might have thanked him for this were I not unnerved by his now external digestion process. I gave my orders, and we began our new work in earnest.
The janitors gathered to watch us, huddled together in their cloaks and chattering excitement from behind their wooden masks. They were, we knew, hoping for a straggler to befall an accident. It would have been convenient for Hilliker’s redundancy to come later in the day. We continued our heavy lifting and openly fantasised that the janitors would slip into the leg’s bristles. Hatred is the most effective form of camaraderie.
We took everything—tiles, A/C units, petroleum generators—to a desolate corner of the warehouse, taking the debris found there and stuffing them in the gaps in the walls created by tearing out the industrial air conditioners. In the new space we arranged things in our best imitation of the original freezer, though, lacking certain materials, the tiles were simply distributed across the floor and the generators openly fastened to the A/C units in a frankly less aesthetic manner.
You all move too quickly, Team Leader radioed to me. The movement risks nausea and completion far ahead of nightshift. Work with persistent clarity of purpose.
I was put at ease. That her main complaint was speed of execution reassured me that my decision was the correct one. Perhaps the whole scenario had been an assessment. I called for the roll cages, which were returned by our coworkers from the loading bay with their now expected hostility. Though open to the warehouse’s elements, the products within the cages quickly approached the expected temperature—I wiped away a layer of frost and displayed my dampened glove to my exhausted group, but they did not smile.
I radioed news of our success. The new freezer was lesser, but it served its purpose.
Nightshift will be informed.
I waited for elaboration, further instruction or my deserved recognition. Nothing else came from Team Leader but a rough burst of static. At this and the sight of my coworkers removing their coats for the shift change, I suffered a momentary loss of equilibrium and, with the intension that none should see me fall, I set off into a staggered run through the aisles. My knees finally dropped and scraped across the threshold of the leg’s room, and I leant forward on the bare, thawed concrete to rest.
Nightshift did not disturb me—they now had no reason to step into the leg’s room. It is possible that others passed by me in that time, but I took notice of nothing but the twitching nub at the end of the leg, watching it makes its irregular and silent circuits. It did not appear to have noticed the change in temperature.
There would be some comfort, I thought, in a version of events where the leg grew or was allowed to grow purely in service of my decline. But that scenario would have me more important than the freezer, itself now diminished and decayed.
I became aware of the cloth billowing by my shoulder. One of the janitors was standing over me, the mask’s pointed chin level with my soft, vulnerable eyes.
“I don’t understand my use here,” I confided. “I don’t understand what we are accomplishing.”
Here, both leg and janitor deserted me.
* * *
Scott McNee tutors in English and Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde. His short fiction and poetry have been published in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, New Writing Scotland, Vastarien, Tether’s End, Kalopsia, Gutter, Quotidian and The Grind.