LZR-1143: Within (5 page)

He was a fairly cowardly man, and he knew it. He was fine with it.

Not great. Not bad. Just fine.

And that’s how he liked it, because just fine was all he knew.

As he walked toward the security office, trailing Antonio and trailed by several other customer service reps from the phone division, he grew nervous. He knew that he didn’t have the courage to b
e
th
e
guy. He wasn’t going to be the man that walked outside alone, ready to brave a horde of sickos for the good of the group; he wasn’t going to be the guy to prop the door open so everyone could be saved, risking life and limb for the group. He just wasn’t. But if he was asked to be, it would cause a conflict between him and Antonio, and he hated conflict. So he was torn.

Louis resolved to sink into the background and participate without leading. He knew that he had taken the initiative earlier, but also knew that that was before he knew the score. He was just looking for his boss in a dark room before. Now, the stakes seemed a little higher.

He could let someone else be the hero.

Antonio stopped as they entered the entrance vestibule, turning toward the rest of them and holding his hand up, his head cocked slightly to the side. For a moment, Louis wondered at his affect, but as he got closer, he heard the sound. A dull thumping was coming from the external door to the left. Louis walked slowly to where Antonio stood, listening. The three other men behind Louis drifted to a stop behind him, one of them starting to speak but hushed quickly by the other two.

Antonio stepped slowly toward the exit door as Louis cringed internally. The sound was of something being beaten against the metal. Something both soft and hard, like a hand or a foot. The solid thunk echoed in the dark chamber, and the inconsistent beating was muffled slightly by the thick metal of the reinforced steel. Louis remembered passing through those doors when he left work. They were at least three inches thick, and had a variety of reinforcing technologies embedded inside the frame. Steel bars that extended out from the frame and magnetic locks were the mainstays, and he suspected that the mechanism of bars was at play now, since the magnetic locks would have been disengaged when the power went out.

Antonio crept forward, his ears picking up the vibrations and his heart hammering in his chest. As he approached, his hand extended involuntarily toward the handle below before he realized his reflexive mistake. If you walk through the same door every day, you get used to the feeling, he supposed.

His arm dropped slowly to his side as he leaned his head toward the metal, placing his cheek against the cold steel. Outside the door, the staccato cadence stayed true. It was a mindless, repetitive sound. It was thoughtless and clearly not motivated by urgency or conscious thought. And it was decidedly the action of a human being.

Louis watched Antonio lean into the door and blinked several times, absently fondling the cellular phone in his pocket. Suddenly, the ringer erupted in the first bar from a Journey song he loved, and which he had set on his phone in an attempt at ironic humor that he hoped no one would peg as a true love for classic rock.

Antonio’s face ripped away from the door and his eyes widened. Behind Louis, one of the men from customer service started pawing at the phone which was emerging from his pocket with his hand. Louis brought the device up from his hip just as the older man from customer service was extending his hand to silence the intrusion. Louis’ hand collided with the other man’s sending the phone into the air and clattering back to the tile floor in an explosion of plastic and a loud, tearing electronic tweet as the volume of the ringtone increased suddenly before dying. Louis stared at the shards of his phone, stunned. Beside him, the older man shot him a withering look as Antonio froze near the door. Louis looked over slowly, recognizing the problem and cursing.

Outside, the pounding had increased.

And it was now coming from both sides of the entrance.

***

The infected were mindlessly violent. There was no explanation for their pathology or their behavior, nor was there any time to study it. As the infection rapidly took hold of large swaths of humanity, police forces and emergency responders fell in the first wave. Unable to hold back the teeming throngs of fleeing civilians, and unable to hold the line of emergency cordons hastily set up to contain those who had been infected, they were overwhelmed or overpowered. Those that refused to flee were killed.

Wherever humans lived and worked, the infection took hold. Big cities, of course, were the first to succumb to massive casualties. With high numbers and dense populations came the highest risk of exponential infection, and in such high density areas, chaos and carnage reigned supreme. Packed together under normal circumstances, held in check by the barest cloak of societal norms, ghettos in Chicago and New York and Miami and Los Angeles, neighborhoods and apartments and vast swaths of foreclosed homes and low income housing, long forgotten by a society all too willing to leave them behind, were breeding grounds for the rapid transmission of the infection.

Schools became charnel houses, and hospitals were among the first to fall, spewing forth vast numbers of the dead and infected living alike.

Office buildings and sky scrapers were incubators and death camps for the white collar workers inside. Packed interstates became feeding grounds and city streets were impassible.

In wealthy neighborhoods, the Beverly Hills and the Green Lakes, the Virginia suburbs and Cape Cod, the infection progressed, albeit slower. It knew no boundaries and moved with the flow of people.

But in a time of abject terror and lawlessness, people moved fast, no matter how wealthy they had once been
.
 

***

Bridget didn’t mind her job. In fact, she kinda thought it rocked. But she was only twenty four, and was content knowing that she had a long life of menial jobs ahead of her, so she knew she had a perspective on this place that the others lacked. Louis was a thirty-something (or at least she thought he was—he was older than she was, at least, and quite honestly, anyone over her age she lumped into the thirty-something demographic) with a live in girlfriend and bad hair, who very clearly wanted more than he had, but was afraid to admit it.

Cam was a slacker and a stoner, but good with computers. He was about her age, though, and she didn’t know anyone her age that didn’t know their way around the internet and all things app. It was how they had grown up. Surrounded by technology and the constant threat of obsolescence or evolution, they adapted quickly to new tech. You just couldn’t afford to ever be the chick that didn’t know about the new thing. Especially in this job market.

Which was why she didn’t mind her job. She had three cats, a crap ton of student loans, and a whiny mother that begged her to go to law school with the same frequency that she begged for grandchildren, a husband, and for god’s sake a pushup bra every once and a while.

Bridget frowned as she remembered her mother and climbed the stairs faster in response, eager to scope out the VP’s office for the radio. Eager for news about what had happened. Or what was happening now.

Cam trailed behind her, and Beverly from wealth management brought up the rear, her short blond hair bouncing around the thick black frames of her designer glasses. Bridget hadn’t ever really talked to Beverly, but suspected that they were two emails, crossing in the night. Her style was more thrift store casual, while Beverly appeared to shop at actual stores. She even drove a Volkswagen, Bridget had observed casually while walking to the bus stop. No, not a match made in heaven.

Bridget flashed the keychain flashlight on the last of the stairs and turned right, moving along the exterior wall and toward the bank of executive offices in the corner of the building. There were only six actual offices in the building, and they were all clustered in one corner.

Across the large room and above their heads, the red emergency lights blazed brightly, their glow just slightly weaker than they had been when the power went out. Bridget wondered as they passed beneath one of the red boxes underneath a large light fixture whether the batteries were designed for prolonged use. This was, after all, the first world. Utilities rarely remained off for long, and the theory behind the emergency lights were that they help you find your way out in an emergency. She chuckled at the last thought, keenly aware of the fact that these lights had simply illuminated the pitch black interior of the windowless crypt of an office. There was, as of now, no way out.

The smile quickly faded when she realized that those lights were the only thing that stood between them and pitch blackness inside the large building.

She hoped that the lights had been designed with longevity in mind.

Behind her, Cam whispered softly.

“You know which is his?” he asked, and she slowed to allow him to come even with her.

She remembered well, having been selected to deliver a presentation for him and several board members on electronic mail responses.  

“Yeah, I know where it is. Just stay with me, okay? I don’t want to lose you up here. It’d take me all night to find another sulky dope with a Justin Bieber hair cut and a teenager’s sense of fashion.” Her voice was serious, but it dripped with sarcasm. Cam grunted once but exhaled in a short laugh.

“Don’t worry, I’m not going anywhere. Not like I could if I wanted to, but …” He trailed off, muttering something under his breath. Behind him, Bridget could hear Beverly breathing heavily, her anxiety becoming apparent.

They approached the office suite carefully, opening the glass doors into the reception area and moving to the right of the large desk. A large computer monitor faced away from the double doors and toward where the receptionist typically sat. The bank’s logo faced the doors, gleaming in well-polished corporate perfection. A neatly arranged stack of two month old magazines sat on a glass-top table next to a large leather sofa, a large—likely fake—palm tree adorned the corner behind the sofa. One large emergency light lit the room, flooding down from a sconce above the center of the door and reflecting from the gleaming corporate logo in an off-putting semblance of blood.

“So his office is through here,” Bridget said softly, unconsciously lowering her voice as if she feared getting caught by the boss. She recognized her anxiety and spoke louder as she turned to Cam and Beverly. “You guys want to hang out here and I’ll pop in?”

Even in the low light she could see Cam’s distorted face as he shook his head. “You crazy? This shit is spooky enough as it is, and we don’t need to start with the horror movie crap. Next thing I know, you’ll be promising to ‘be right back’ and suggesting we split up into teams of one and go into the freezer…”

“The building doesn’t have a freezer,” she managed to insert, smiling.

“ … and we’ll be picking pieces of each other from the rusty tools of the crazy mutants or homicidal plague-infected whack-jobs…”

“And I don’t think a team can have just one person,” she began, as he continued to rail. Her amusement ended suddenly as Beverly gasped quickly and backed away from the door, shooting her hand into Cam, who spoke several more agitated words before Bridget grabbed his shirt and shook it softly.

She had heard it too.

Beverly slipped behind them both, moving behind the counter and crouching below the desk. Bridget grunted once in derision, moving toward the door as Cam stayed frozen near the front of the desk.

She heard it again. The sound of something skittering across a smooth floor, as if being dragged or kicked repeatedly. In the low light, struggling to discern movement against the erratically bright spot lights and the pockets of shadow, she peered into the darkness, leaning out from the open glass doorway into the hall.

It was quiet, but for a dull, steady pounding that reverberated up the stairwell from downstairs. It was a sound she assumed to be the team at the front, trying to open the door into the security room. Her breath was coming more rapidly, and she felt her hand shake slightly as she brushed her short hair back from her face. She fought the sudden urge that stirred beneath her belt, cursing herself for not using the toilet before coming upstairs. The unbidden, uncomfortable tightness made her shift her weight.

Behind her, Cam whispered, his voice raspy and dry.

“Do you see anything?”

She shook her head slightly, eyes unblinkingly focused on the shadows across the room. They swam in front of her as the bright light from the spotlights began to spot her vision, and she blinked despite her best efforts.