“Come on,” I scream at the screen. Then I hear the lock click behind me. The door to my office opens and I crawl inside and wait to hear it close again. The room springs to life, power comes back on. Lights flicker, screens load. I hear computers boot up. I’m shaking uncontrollably now, every muscle in my body is tensing and releasing all at once.
I look around and see the room spinning. Then I see the barrel of a gun. I hear a click. I see boots.
“Who the fuck are you, and how did you get in here?” asks someone—sounds like a woman. The barrel of a gun is very cold. Never knew that before. I can’t answer back, I’m so tired. I look over and there are more feet.
“Help me. Please?” I manage to ask. My throat is closing up, can’t stop the shaking.
Someone kicks me in the head.
Thank you.
4.
“Who are you?” asks the woman who held the gun to my head earlier. She’s standing in front of me and I’m strapped to a chair, arms and legs bound tight. My left eye is incredibly swollen; I can barely see out of it. Boots kicked me in the head.
“Who the fuck are you?” I ask back, and then regret saying anything as her open hand slams against my face. Sometimes you’re the windshield; sometimes you’re the fly, says my brain. I shake my head and try to focus again.
“I’m the one asking questions here, so I’m gonna ask you again: who are you, how did you get in here, and what are you doing here?”
She’s not very pretty. Hard lines mark the corners of her mouth—“Frown lines,” Janet used to call them. Her eyes are cold and hard. She has short hair pulled back in a ponytail. Her clothes look like they fell off the back of a truck bound for a survivalist dyke convention. I run my tongue over my lips trying not to laugh at my own joke and taste blood.
“I need water. Please, some water and then I’ll tell you,” I say back and brace for another slamming fist. To my surprise I get a bottle of water with a straw instead of another smack.
“Here,” she says and I take a small sip. The water is cold and tastes like blood mixed with nothing, but it helps. There’s another person standing next to her. He’s skinny and wearing similar clothing. He has guns.
He looks just as tired as she does; his eyes are just as cold, black and empty. She pulls the straw and bottle away from me and I try to smile the five thousand dollar smile at her. I don’t think it’s going to work. I don’t think my smile is worth that much anymore.
“I own this building,” I begin to say but Skinny cuts me off.
“Nobody owns buildings anymore, asshole,” he says but she puts up her hand and Skinny obeys.
Good. Now I know who’s in charge. I look at Skinny and make sure he knows I’d like to snap his neck. I probably couldn’t, at least not in this condition. But still, it’s the thought that counts.
“Can I finish?” I ask them but really, I’m still staring at Skinny. Nobody moves. I don’t get another hand in the face. Skinny looks the other way, out towards the windows.
“Good. Like I was saying my name is Jeff and I own this building. Maybe you’ve heard of me: Jeff Sorbenstein? I was Time magazine’s Man of the Year last year.”
I see her face soften; Skinny is still looking out the window, completely not paying attention. Then he spits on the floor.
“Hey, what the fuck, do I come over to your house and spit on your floor?” I say to his back.
He turns back to me and laughs and then comes in real close. His breath is hot and smells terrible.
“Listen,” he says, “for all intents and purposes, champ, this is my home so if I want to spit, shit or anything else on the fucking floor, then I fucking will. Got it?” Then he turns around and looks back at the woman and asks, “Right, Kel?”
The woman is staring at me like she just put two and five together and now it’s her turn to get fucked. She’s probably thinking about how much shit she’s going to be in or, more likely, how much money she can get out of me. I try to smile at her again but she’s fumbling with her holster, then she’s pointing her gun at my head.
“You’re a monster; you’re the fucking monster that did this,” she says in a whisper, eyes wide.
Great, just my luck, anti-technology freaks. My building has been overrun by anti-tech heads.
I look up at her and ask, “What?”
Her hand is shaking; her finger is resting on the side of the trigger. She’s pushing the gun into my forehead—leaving a mark, a small circle less than the size of a dime is being slowly drilled into the middle of my head and I’m about to die for the second time in my life. Skinny looks surprised; he’s trying to ask her questions and I close my eyes, waiting for the sound, waiting for the heat of the bullet.
“Kel, what the fuck are you doing?” asks Skinny. I can hear the shock in his voice. Something’s not right. I open my eyes and Skinny is looking at her like she’s completely lost it, like he’s the sane one. She’s the one I have to talk to, try and reason with. Jesus, I got cancer, froze myself, got screwed over by my lawyer and ex-wife who then left me for dead and now I have to deal with this.
“He’s the one that did this,” she says back to him. Her eyes are rimming with shock and tears.
Skinny looks confused; he glances at me then back out the window and then, as if an actual light bulb went off in his head, he finally figures out what she’s trying to tell him. He lunges at me; his eyes are filled with rage.
She screams his name as we tumble backwards onto the floor. I think she says “Scott”—I’m not sure. Skinny is mashing his fist into my head and his hands feel like cinder blocks.
“I’m gonna smash your fucking brains in, asshole,” he’s yelling into my face—hot, dirty breath. I still have no idea what it is that they’re talking about. I try to tell them but every time I open my mouth, another of his fists hits me. She moves in to pull him off me and I don’t know if I’m thankful or not. I can’t tell anymore.
“Scott, stop,” she says pulling him off of me. Trails of spit and blood follow his hands; he breaks free and comes back at me.
“Scott, Goddamnit, that’s an order,” she yells and he stops as if he’s on autopilot. Then he stands up straight and faces her.
“You’re not in charge anymore, Kel. Remember? No more orders. That’s what we said when we came in here.”
She bites her lip and looks like a child and says, “I know, Scott, but if it is really him then he doesn’t know.”
Skinny looks confused again. “How can he not know?” he asks.
She looks over at me like she’s checking my face, making sure I’m telling the truth, then looks back to him. “Because he froze himself before everything happened.”
Skinny doesn’t understand and neither do I, but I’m glad he’s not trying to ram his fist into my skull through my face. She was just going to blow my head off, now she’s saving me from having my head smashed in. I don’t get it. Now my right eye feels swollen; I think he broke my nose.
“You were just gonna blow his head off,” he says back to her.
She shakes her head. “No. I lost my cool. It’s just…I was…I lost my cool,” she says through thickening tears.
I try to look around but my eyelids feel too heavy. Skinny moves in to hug her; she wipes away the tears from her eyes. They move apart but there’s a connection here that isn’t just on the surface—have to remember that.
“What? What did I do?” I ask. My voice sounds frail and distant. They turn to me and pull me back up and then push my chair towards the windows, slamming me into it. I try to focus. My head feels like it’s full of oatmeal. The light outside is incredibly bright, like a blanket of grey. I look out towards the skyline. I force my eyes open and see the world for the first time since I woke up.
Low-hanging cloud cover isn’t really cloud cover; the sky is blue above the haze. It’s smoke. Huge billows of black, white and grey smoke waft through the corridors of the city. Cars in the street crisscross lanes as if they were just left to
crash. Doors hang open, bodies lay just outside them. Military vehicles are smashed and broken. There are several metal fences, crowd control barricades, scattered around, and some are overturned and left like skeletons. I see people walking, stumbling around. Some of them have arms and legs that look broken, crooked like the man in the lobby. Some of them look like they just woke up and went off to work, but there’s still something off about them.
The streetlights are all out. Black and white bags line the sidewalks and streets; they’re bulky, lumpy. They have bodies in them. The dead are dumped and rotting. The sky is blue and the dead line the street and the cars are abandoned and the sky is on fire. The sun is dim and yellow; mixed into the haze of the smoke it looks evil. I focus in on some of the people in the street, walking, falling, searching, looking—their faces are wrong. The world is wrong. The world is burning.
The familiar outline of both the Terminal Tower and Key Tower look like stubbed cigars, charred and brown. Public Square is full of broken, crooked, bloody, grey-skinned people. My city is burning; my city is dead.
“What happened?” I ask, still staring out the window, still trying to understand what it is that I’m seeing.
“You,” says the woman named Kel. She moves towards Skinny—Scott—whatever. They’re standing behind me now, holding each other. I can see the outline of their joined shape in the glass of the window. I look out and see the world, my world.
“Let me go,” I say and Skinny laughs.
“No way, asshole,” he says.
“I need to know how this happened,” I say back, but I can’t stop looking out across the city, my city.
“We just told you,” he says, then starts in on me with something else, I cut him off.
“Do you want to eat hot food tonight?” I say but nobody answers back; I can feel the hesitation in the air. They’re considering it.
“I can route the power from the solar panels to just this room. Right now it’s being used up by keeping the base systems on: lights, magnetic locks, et cetera. I can reroute it all to come in here and we can have hot water, hot food and internet.”
Skinny laughs again. I haven’t heard from Kel yet. She’s thinking about it though. I can’t see her face, but I know she’s not that stupid.
“There’s no more internet, dude,” says Skinny.
I crane my head around to look back at him. “I am the fucking internet, dude. Every website, blog, micro blog, tweet, news site, feed, vid-feed, everything—it’s all cached on the main servers that are housed in the middle of this room. I have to know what happened. Untie me, please.”
“What’s going to happen if those magnetic locks unlock and those things get in here, huh? Did you think about that?”
“I can route enough power to keep those online,” I say.
He starts to object again but Kel cuts him off and says, “Okay.”
She moves to untie me. The knots around my hands loosen and I immediately feel better. I move to untie the ones at my feet and then stand up. Before I turn around I hear the gun. I turn around slowly and Kel is there. I stare at the gun again.
“If you so much as move in a way that makes me think you’re fucking us over, I will shoot you. Do you understand?” she says.
I nod and say, “Yes,” to make sure she knows that I understand, completely.
“Good, now get to work.” She motions with the gun towards my desk then lets her arm come down; I nod again slowly and move. I sit down in my chair. It feels good, even with knowing that one wrong move means that I’ll probably be dead before I can blink. Just the thought of sitting behind my desk again makes me feel alive. I smile.
“Okay,” I whisper to the touchscreens as they blink to life. “Here we go.”
* * *
It takes me three hours to route all of the power that’s been sitting in the backup generators to my office. The sun is going down now and I’m still at my desk. My hands feel like they’re cramping up and my back is killing me.
I haven’t eaten anything yet, but I did get up once to make some coffee. My stomach feels like its eating itself alive and I’m fairly nauseous, but I don’t want to stop until I have everything done and uploaded. There isn’t anything left in the fridge food-wise, but I’m pretty sure there’s enough canned stuff down in the cafeteria to last us a while. It was well-stocked and probably locked down the minute the building went dark.
I tell them about the cafeteria and they talk about how they’re going to go about getting there. I position one of the screens so that they can look at it and pull up a map of the building showing the fastest routes and the video feeds from all of the surveillance cameras that are still intact.
Later, when the sun starts to go down, we decide to keep the lights dim enough for us to see each other and where were going in the rooms. Anything more and it’ll probably attract attention that we don’t want. I ask them about the outbreak—what they know of it, at least. They don’t tell me much, but I can’t believe what I’m hearing. It sounds like a movie. I begin to pull in the first of the large cached files that’ll have the backups I need.
They take turns watching me. First it’s Kel and then it’s Scott. We don’t talk. This is to say they don’t talk to me, at least not enough to be considered a conversation. They ask me if I’m sure that there’s enough power to split between everything that I’m doing and the magnetic locks and I say, “I‘m sure.”
The building’s been storing solar power in banks of generators large enough to power small countries in the sub-sub-basement. The only thing we really have to worry about is the diesel backups. But since the building hasn’t been running full-steam for almost a year, there should be enough to get us through at least a year, or so I hope. I don’t tell them the last part.
I look down and the screen reads out the time: 5:55. I look up again and stare out the window and time has no meaning. It’s completely dark now and the only light in the place is the white glow of my monitors.
Bringing the lights back up is easier than I thought. Getting the right amount of light to see in but that can’t be seen by whatever those things in the street are, is much more difficult. I hunker back down over the screens and start tapping in commands to pull up the last date that there was anything updated on the main servers. The lights flicker a bit making them both jump.
“What the fuck?” asks Scott. He’s pointing another gun at me. I wave dismissively with my right hand.
“I just brought my main servers back online again, just a small hiccup,” I say back to him. He’s sitting on the chair that Rob threw me into and I smile. I bet Rob got away. It’s getting easier to work with a gun pointed at me. For the first half hour or so, when I was trying to really concentrate on not screwing up the sequences, it was a little distracting, but now I don’t even notice. It’s just there.
I pull up the last of large format files and ping in. The screen to my right blazes to life with my sign in then starts pulling up every feed that went out in the last year. I make sure to do an external save to a new set of ghost servers and then wave my hand in front of the screen to make it sleep. Later.
I get up and move out from behind my desk and stretch.
I say to them, “I need to eat something, but first I am making another pot of coffee and taking a shower. When I’m done I am going down to cafeteria and getting food. Are you coming with me?” They look at each other and then back to me as if I’ve just said something in Hebrew.
Scott starts first. “Do you know what those things are out there, man? They’re fucking zombies, as in eat-our-ass-for-dinner zombies.”
“I already pulled up all of the videos from the cafeteria and the floor plan. You’ve had enough time to figure something out. If not, I don’t care. I’m going,” I say, cutting him off.
Kel shakes her head. “Okay, we’ll go, but if you—”
I cut her off too. I’m sick and tired of this; I’m starting to feel like me again. “It’s my building, my food and if you wan
t any of it then you’ll come with me. If not, then you can go get your own food by yourselves later. And spare me the ‘I’ll shoot you’ routine. I get it.”
Scott gets up like he’s going to hit me again. I stop him.
“Really? You’re gonna hit the guy that could easily fuck your whole day up by letting those—whatever they are—into the building?”
Scott sits back down and says, “Fuck you, asshole.”
I turn back to Kel. “Look, you have the guns, but I have the controls. You got it?”
She nods her head, still not sure of where I’m going with this speech, probably kicking herself mentally for letting me out of the chair.
“We’re a democracy now,” I say to both of them. Scott pouts and mumbles something that sounds like “whatever.”
“So that means that right now you need me and I need you. So we share,” I say and wait for some kind of push back, but Scott just keeps pouting.
Kel nods her head again and says, “Agreed.”
I move towards my kitchen. The last time I was here I was lying on the floor in my own filth and puke. I look down at the coffee pot and then down to my plastic pants and the lab coat outfit. Not much has changed. I put a new pot of coffee on and then move back out towards the main office area. Scott is fumbling with a lighter and a cigarette butt that looks like it’s been his last cigarette butt for years. Nobody should have to smoke like that.
I say, “Hey,” and they both turn around. I point towards my desk. “Bottom desk drawer: there are cartons and lighters. No menthol, just regular. I don’t know how fresh they are but it’s better than that thing, I’m sure.”
His eyes go wide. I move up the stairs to my bedroom and grab some clothing and then head back down and into the bathroom. Scott’s already smoking; Kel is lighting up as I come down.
She nods her head and I’m pretty sure that means thanks. I nod back and say, “Save me some,” then go into the bathroom.
The water isn’t as hot as I would like it to be. I figure the instant hots haven’t been up and running in at least nine months, but right now it’s the best shower I have taken in my entire life, ever.
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