Hudson walked into the office a full thirty minutes late. He walked quickly, head down and embarrassed, past all the desks to the section where his teammates usually sat.

They had a section of four cubicles connected together. The shared walls formed a ‘plus’ sign if you looked down at them from the ceiling. Ostensibly one of them was Hudson’s to use, but he had always worked from his apartment and the others had used it basically for storage. Sam, Liam, and Noah weren’t at their computers for some reason, so he moved a few boxes off of his chair and sat down with a huff.

He had just gotten his laptop out of his bag, plugged it in and turned it on when a familiar voice called out.

“Well well, look who finally decided to show up.” Noah was looking down at him from around the edge of his cubicle.

“You missed the 9am stand-up, kiddo. Did you get here late? Not know about the meeting? Or just decide not to go? And what is that smell…” Noah asked. He was peering over the edge of his glasses at Hudson, and his nose was scrunched up like he was smelling something strange.

“What meeting? There’s nothing on my calendar,” Hudson replied.

“Well, whatever the case may be,” Noah said with a sniff, “You’re making the team look bad. The ‘ole boss man was specifically looking for you this morning and asking me where you were.”

Great. This week was supposed to be about him proving himself, and already he was in trouble. Just great.

“I’ll go let Clarence know I’m here now,” Hudson started to get up.

“Well hang on there, now, high-speed.” Noah liked to use these pet names like ‘high-speed’ or ‘killer’ or ‘friend.’ Hudson thought it was from Noah’s time in the Army, but he wasn’t sure. He also wasn’t sure what all of them meant. He was very sure that he didn’t like being called those names.

“During the stand-up this morning, we got us a bona-fide fire drill,” Noah continued. “Immediate action needed. Revisions to forecast due no later than noon today, based on latest sales. Plus a little reconnoiter with Ops, and a soft reachout to a few trusted customers to get some feedback on the latest changes.”

“OK, ok,” Hudson said, trying to follow along with all of the jargon. Fire drill. Immediate action! Seemed like an opportunity to show his worth. “Do we have any of those customer calls scheduled yet? I can always reach out to my friend Ben over at –”

“We already figured out how to divide and conquer,” Noah interrupted. “Sam’s talking to Ops, Liam and I are reaching out to customers. You’re the spreadsheet jockey. We reconvene after lunch and then go report to the bossman. You got it?”

“I got it,” Hudson said.

He pulled up the files on his laptop and started cranking. There was something relaxing about working with orderly rows and columns of numbers. It was like diving for pearls in a deep ocean lagoon… the outside world became quiet as he drifted down into the sea of data, finding those hidden nuggets of insight.

He was seeing something strange in the data, something very unexpected. He double and triple checked his data sources, and his formulas, and everything seemed to be checking out – except for the end result. He was just finishing up his updates to the forecasts when his phone rang.

“Hey Ben,” Hudson answered. “How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been Ben, thank you very much,” a chuckling Ben replied.

“That joke was old the first time you made it back when we were freshmen,” Hudson replied with a groan. “And it hasn’t gotten any better since.”

“You stop laughing at it and I’ll stop saying it, how about that?”

“Sure, sure.”

“But hey,” Ben said, taking on a more serious tone, “what’re y’all up to over there?”

“What do you mean?” Hudson asked.

“Well, first thing y’all raised your prices dramatically last week and started putting some of our orders on backorder. Despite the fact I know you had the stock the week before,” Ben said.

“Huh. I’m not sure. That’s certainly news to me,” Hudson said.

“You sure about that? Cuz some smarmy guy named Noah called up my boss this morning, asking him not to cancel any more orders. I was sitting in my boss’s office listening to this guy apologizing all over himself about the price increases and blaming it on, and I quote, ‘some egg-headed pricing analyst who put the numbers in wrong.’ Don’t tell me that egg-headed analyst was you?”

Uh-oh.

…..

Hudson put his cell phone back in his pocket and thought about what Ben had told him. Ben’s company was one of his company’s biggest customers. The two companies had always done some business together, but after Hudson and Ben had both joined their respective jobs, they had been able to find ways to work together more efficiently, making more money for both companies.

Last week he had done an exhaustive market analysis and determined that some of their items were priced too high. He had recommended a few changes – lowering pricing on a few items and stocking more in a few specific warehouses – as a way to potentially increase the sales for his company.

But it seemed like the exact opposite had happened: inventory positions were lowered and prices were increased, and now a bunch of customers were very upset. What Hudson couldn’t figure out was why… Had Noah taken his work and either ignored it or changed it? Was he being blamed for this mess, when it was the opposite of his ideas in the first place?

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

He walked over to his boss’s corner office. The door was open, so he stuck his head in.

“Hi Clarence, do you have a few minutes?”

His boss looked up and motioned him in. “Go ahead and close the door.”

Hudson closed the door and sat down. He ordered his thoughts, but before he could speak, Clarence started.

“You’ve landed us in a difficult position, Hudson.”

“Are you talking about the price increases and customer complaints? I was looking into that this morning and it’s very strange, I –”

“Yes. The price increases you recommended last week, that your team thought… that I thought… that we all thought were sufficiently researched and analyzed.”

“Hang on a second, I didn’t –”

“I suppose all failures are ultimately a failure of leadership, but in this case, if we trace the root cause backwards, it is pretty clear who screwed up.” Clarence paused long enough to lean back in his chair and glare down the bridge of his nose at Hudson.

“If you’d let me try and explain, that’s not –”

Clarence wouldn’t let him get a word in edgewise. “It’s past the time for excuses. Your team is out there trying to fix your mistakes and cover for you. They were actually here on time this morning as well, not that you could be bothered. I assume you have an excuse for that? Well, I am not interested in hearing it.”

The familiar rage was back. His anger from last week, that he’d finally been able to let go after meditating all of the previous night, and more so besides, was resurging with a vengeance and building up inside of Hudson. His boss was wrong, and he wouldn’t even let Hudson try and explain himself. He tried to breathe. To block it out, and calm down.

“Maybe it’s a generational thing. The lack of discipline. The general lack of accountability. Back in my day…”

Hudson’s vision was turning white at the edges. His ears buzzed and stung with the sound of a thousand gnats.

Focus, he told himself. Breathe in, and let the anger flow out. Instead of one of his normal breathing methods, his body turned to the one he had done most recently. The one he’d learned from copying Chiang-sensei.

Rather than slowing down, his breaths sped up. His heart thundered explosively. An engine started in his chest, an engine that was not going to slow down.

“... and we can’t just let this type of gross negligence go. You’re fired, effective immediately –”

Hudson lost control.

“HYAH!! ” Hudson yelled as he slammed his hands down the desk in front of him. The force of the kiai from his lungs blew all the papers off of the desk and into the air, creating a small tornado of white in the small office.

If Hudson had been thinking rationally, he would have expected his hands to smack the desk with a decent-sized bang. Probably sting his fingers a little bit. But that’s not what happened.

Hudson’s hands struck the top of the desk and kept going, completely disintegrating the cheap particle board and continuing straight on through. The rest of the desk shivered and cracked into splinters.

Clarence stared at Hudson in shock. Hudson stared at his own hands in shock. Where had that come from?

“How dare you!” Clarence squeaked out, his voice pitched high with fear and indignation.

“How dare I?” Hudson replied. His shock at his own super strength had brought him back to lucidity, but the anger was still there, simmering in the engine of his deep breathing.

“How dare I?” he repeated. “None of this is my fault, and you won’t even let me explain myself. I’m fired? I quit. I’m done with you, with my crappy, back-stabbing team, and I’m done with this company.”

Hudson yanked open the door to Clarence’s office and slammed it shut on his way out. Everyone in the office was staring at Hudson as the door jam splintered into pieces and the glass window next to the door shattered with a loud crash.

…..

Hudson closed the door to his apartment, and just sank to the floor, his back to the wall. He was completely drained, both mentally and physically.

He had left his company quickly after basically destroying his boss’s office, but the company hadn’t let that sit. They had called the police and were pressing charges. Destruction of property. Attempted assault. They were even saying that Hudson had purposefully been trying to anger customers and drive off business – which wasn’t true, of course.

Now it was true he had completely disintegrated that desk with his bare hands. The police had taken his boss’s statement first, and while Clarence may have been many things, he wasn’t much of a liar. He had sworn up and down that Hudson had caused all of the damage in the office in just a few seconds and with only his fists.

The police didn’t really buy that, and kept searching Hudson’s apartment for a baseball bat or some other blunt weapon he could have used. Eventually they gave up, but only after telling Hudson he had to report to the police station to have his mug shot taken. At least they didn’t arrest him on the spot and put him in a squad car. His neighbors were almost certainly gossiping already about what kind of trouble he was in.

There was a knock on his door behind him. He staggered up and looked through the peephole. It was his landlord.

“I know you’re in there. Open up – what kind of trouble are you in with the cops? I can’t believe this. We don’t tolerate that kind of trouble around here.

“Hello! Open up!”

Hudson ignored it and sank back onto the floor. He couldn’t deal with anyone else right now.

Eventually the pounding on his door stopped, but Hudson still couldn’t get himself to move. He didn’t know what to do. He’d lost his temper, lost his job, and ultimately maybe even his freedom. He didn’t want to go to jail.

He was more confused than excited by how his bare hands had completely destroyed his boss’s desk.

The knocking on his door started up again. He really, really, did not want to deal with his landlord right now, but the knocking kept going. Steady and consistent.

Knock. Knock. Knock. Knock. Each strike on the door vibrated through Hudson’s head. It was maddening.

Finally Hudson lurched to his feet to open the door, before he got angry again. Who knew, if he got angry again, maybe this time he’d destroy his own apartment.

He yanked the door open, ready to get yelled at by his landlord. But it wasn’t his landlord at the door.

It was a middle-aged Chinese woman with spiked, green hair.