Dean Koontz - Tick Tock

For years, all three men had worked seven days a week, a full fifty-six hours each, because most of the bakery’s customers needed fresh merchandise on a daily basis. When one of them needed to have a weekend off, the other two split his time between them and worked sixty-four-hour weeks without complaint. Vietnamese-Americans with an entrepreneurial bent were among the most industrious people in the country and could never be faulted for failing to carry their own weight. Sometimes, however, Tommy wondered how many of Ton’s and Gi’s generation - former refugees, boat chil-dren highly motivated to succeed by early memories of poverty and terror in Southeast Asia - would live long enough to retire and enjoy the peace that they had struggled so hard to earn.

The family was finally training a cousin - the American-born son of Tommy’s mother’s younger sister - to serve as a shift manager on a rotating basis that would allow everyone at the management level to work approxi-mately forty-hour weeks and, at last, have normal lives. They had resisted bringing in the cousin, because for too long they had stubbornly waited for Tommy to return to the fold and take that job himself.

Tommy suspected that his parents had believed he’d eventually be overwhelmed with guilt as he watched his father and his brothers working themselves half to death to keep all the principal management positions in the immediate family. Indeed, he had lived with such guilt that he’d had dreams in which he’d been behind the wheel of a car with his father and brothers as passengers, and he’d recklessly driven it off a high cliff, killing them all, while he miraculously survived. Dreams in which he had been flying a plane filled with his family, crashed, and walked away as the sole survivor, his clothes red with their blood. Dreams in which a whirlpool sucked down their small boat at night on the South China Sea, drowning everyone but the youngest and most thoughtless of all the Phans, he himself, the son who was sharper than a serpent’s tooth. He had learned to live with the guilt, however, and to resist the urge to give up his dream of being a writer.

Now, as he and Del stepped through the back door of the New World Saigon Bakery, Tommy was con-flicted. Simultaneously he felt at home yet on dangerous ground.

The air was redolent of baking bread, brown sugar, cinnamon, baker’s cheese, bitter chocolate, and other tantalizing aromas less easily identifiable in the fragrant melange. This was the smell of his childhood, and it plunged him into a sensory river of wonderful memories, torrents of images from the past. This was also the smell of the future that he had firmly rejected, however, and underneath the mouth-watering savour, Tommy detected a cloying sweetness that, by virtue of its very inten-sity, would in time sour the appetite, nauseate, and leave the tongue capable of detecting only bitterness in any flavour.

Approximately forty employees in white uniforms and white caps were hard at work in the large main room - pastry chefs, bread bakers, assistant bakers, clean-up boys - amidst the assembly tables, dough-mixing machines, cook tops, and ovens. The whir of mixer blades, the clink-clank of spoons and metal spatulas, the scrape-rattle of pans and cookie sheets being slid across baking racks, the muffled roar of gas flames in the hollow steel shells of the minimally insulated commercial ovens:

this noise was music to Tommy, although like everything else about the place, it had two conflicting qualities - a cheerful and engaging melody, but an ominous underlying rhythm.

The hot air immediately chased away the chill of the night and the rain. But almost at once, Tommy felt that the air was too hot to breathe comfortably.

‘Which one’s your brother?’ Del asked.

‘He’s probably in the shift manager’s office.’ Tommy realized that Del had removed the Santa hat. ‘Thanks for not wearing the stupid hat.’

She withdrew it from a pocket in her leather jacket. ‘I only took it off so the rain wouldn’t ruin it.’

‘Please don’t wear it, don’t embarrass me,’ he said.

‘You have no sense of style.’

‘Please. I want my brother to take me seriously.’

‘Doesn’t your brother believe in Santa?’

‘Please. My family are very serious people.’

‘Please, please,’ she mocked him, but teasingly and without malice. ‘Maybe they should have become mor-ticians instead of bakers.’

Tommy expected her to don the frivolous red-flannel chapeaux with characteristic defiance, but she crammed it back into her jacket pocket.

‘Thank you,’ he said gratefully.

‘Take me to the sombre and humourless Gi Minh Phan, infamous anti-Santa activist.’

Tommy led her along one side of the main room, between the equipment-packed baking floor and the stainless-steel doors to a series of coolers and storerooms. The place was brightly lighted with banks of suspended fluorescent fixtures, and everything was nearly as well scrubbed as a hospital surgery.

He had not visited the bakery in at least four years, during which time its business had grown, so he didn’t recognize many of the employees on the graveyard shift. They all appeared to be Vietnamese, and the great majority were men. Most of them were concentrating so intensely on their work that they didn’t notice they had visitors.

The few who looked up tended to focus on Del Payne and give Tommy only scant attention. Even rain-soaked - again - and bedraggled, she was an attractive woman. In her wet and clinging white uniform and black leather jacket, she possessed an irresistible air of mystery.

He was glad she wasn’t wearing the Santa hat. That would have been too much novelty to ignore even for a roomful of industrious Vietnamese fixated on their work. Everyone would have been staring at her.

The manager’s office was in the right front corner of the room, elevated four steps above the main floor. Two walls were glass, so the shift boss could see the entire bakery without getting up from his desk.

More often than not, Gi would have been on the floor, working elbow to elbow with the bakers and their apprentices. At the moment, however, he was at his computer, with his back to the glass door at the top of the steps.

Judging by the tables of data on the monitor, Tommy figured his brother was putting together a computer model of the chemistry of a new recipe. Evidently some pastry hadn’t been coming out of the ovens as it should,

and they hadn’t been able to identify the problem on the floor, with sheer baker’s instinct.

Gi didn’t turn around when Tommy and Del entered, closing the door behind them. ‘Minute,’ he said, and his fingers flew across the computer keyboard.

Del nudged Tommy with one elbow and showed him the red-flannel cap, half out of her pocket.

He scowled.

She grinned and put the cap away.

When Gi finished typing, he spun around in his chair, expecting to see an employee, and gaped wide-eyed at his brother. ‘Tommy!’

Unlike their brother Ton, Gi Minh was willing to use Tommy’s American name.

‘Surprise,’ Tommy said.

Gi rose from his chair, a smile breaking across his face, but then he registered that the person with Tommy wasn’t an employee, either. As he turned his full atten-tion to Del, his smile froze.

‘Merry Christmas,’ Del said.

Tommy wanted to tape her mouth shut, not because her greeting was completely off the wall - after all, Christmas was only seven weeks away and supermarkets were already selling decorations - but because she almost made him laugh, and laughter was not going to help him convince Gi of the seriousness of their plight.

‘Gi,’ Tommy said, ‘I would like you to meet a friend of mine. Miss Del Payne.’

Gi inclined his head politely toward her, and she held out her hand, and Gi took it after only a brief hesitation. ‘Miss Payne.’