A description that, Mark feared, would soon apply to this elevator.
This sort of thing wasn’t supposed to happen. This was the Umbrella Corporation. They made the best computer equipment and health-care products in the country. They had the wherewithal to build the most amazing underground complex in the history of humanity.
This was not a company that built elevators that plunged to their doom during fire drills.
Mark heard a lot of screams. That elevator was full.
People were dead.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. He was supposed to be starting his new dream job, one that would keep him gainfully employed for at least five years.
People were dead.
Sure, people died, but not like this. They died in car accidents or plane crashes, like Mark’s Uncle Victor, or of old age or disease like Grandma and Grandpa. They didn’t die during fire drills on their first day at work. That just didn’t happen. Mark refused to believe it.
Then, all of a sudden, his stomach felt like it was slamming up into his chest as the elevator started plummeting to its doom.
When he was a kid, Mark always used to love roller coasters. Even as his brothers screamed in joyous panic at the twists and turns the coaster took them on, and yelled in thrilling fear at the feel of the air as it slammed into their faces, Mark would always sit next to them with a big grin on his face. He loved being tossed around like that.
This panic, however, was nothing like joyous and the fear was quite real.
So this time, Mark screamed.
Dimly, he registered that the other occupants of the elevator were also screaming, but that wasn’t as important to Mark as the stunning realization that he was going to die.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was starting a new job. He’d have the job for at least five years. He’d be gainfully employed. He wouldn’t be living in the misery that his friends were toiling in.
A screeching sound penetrated the wall of screams, and Mark realized that the emergency brakes were (finally!) kicking in. Moments later, the elevator slammed to a halt, and Mark collapsed to the ground, both his jacket and what was left of his coffee spilling to the floor.
He clambered quickly to his feet, reveling in the feeling of being alive.
Peculiarly, the most overwhelming feeling he had was elation that he’d be alive to attend the next Bad Movie Night. In fact, he was determined to go no matter what kind of hoops he had to jump through. The prospect of being able to see Bride of the Monster with his closest friends was suddenly the happiest thought he could have.
Ella had already risen, and she was now walking to the doors.
Mark looked up to see that the elevator had apparently stopped on the third floor.
He then looked over to see that Ella had removed a Swiss Army knife from somewhere on her person, and was using its blade to try to pry open the elevator doors. He was about to offer assistance—Ella was tiny, and couldn’t have had much upper-arm strength—when the doors, with a screeching noise that was eerily similar to the emergency brakes, started to separate.
She then methodically stuck her fingers between the doors and started to pry them apart. One of the other men got up to give her a hand.
“I can’t get a good grip,” Ella muttered.
Noticing that there was a blank wall on the other side of the door, Mark said, “We’re not on a floor.”
“Yeah, we are.” One of the men pointed to the floor.
Only then did Mark notice the small shaft of light poking through.
From the looks of it, the elevator had finally come to a halt just as it was about to pass the third floor. The bottom of the elevator was currently about two feet down from the top of the third-floor elevator doors.
Ella let the doors close on the blade of the knife, then got down on her knees, moving the knife blade with her toward the floor. Mark winced as the blade scraped against the door, giving him shivers up and down his spine.
All things considered, though, he didn’t really mind it.
Especially given the alternatives.
Again, Ella squeezed her fingers between the doors, trying to get them to part. Being able to stick her fingers farther out through the gap between the top of the outer doors and the bottom of the elevator’s inner doors, she was able to get them open at least a little bit.
Enough, at least, to see the third floor, get someone’s attention, and ask for help.
Maybe ask what in God’s name was going on, while they were at it.
“My God.”
Mark looked up. Ella’s voice sounded, if it were possible, even more hollow and lifeless.
His breaths started going shallow again. He wasn’t sure how much more of this he could take.
A fervent desire to go hide in a corner warred in Mark’s mind with a desperate need to see what Ella saw. Against his better judgment, the latter prevailed.
Blinking a fresh influx of sweat out of his eye, he practically pushed Ella to the side. “Let me see.”
Bodies.
Mark saw at least seven or eight people lying on the floor. They seemed to have just fallen down in a random pattern. Some wore suits, others the all-white lab outfits. Not surprisingly, given that it was his first day, Mark didn’t recognize any of them. Some, he couldn’t even see their faces.
He was no doctor. The view he had was obstructed.
But he knew the instant he looked at them that all those people were dead.
They weren’t moving. They weren’t breathing. And they weren’t going to.
“We have to get out of here.” Mark tore his gaze from the bodies and stood up. “We have to get out of this building!”
One of the other men gave him a you’re damn right look, and the two of them knelt down and tried to pry the doors farther apart.
“Here, give me a hand.”
Mark curled his fingers around one door while the other guy did likewise for the opposite door. With all his might, fueled by fear and desperation, he pulled.
The doors didn’t move any farther apart.
“That’s as far as they’ll go.”
The other man nodded. “They’re caught on something.”
A voice from behind Mark said, “That’s wide enough.”
Mark turned to see Ella shrugging her jacket off.
“I think I can squeeze through,” she said. “I’ll get help.”
Looking over the slim woman, Mark had to agree that, if nothing else, she was the only person in the elevator who even had a chance of getting through the tiny gap.
He also promised himself that, if they did somehow get out of this, he was definitely asking this woman out.
Ella got down on her stomach, snaked her right arm through the gap, then started to worm her head in.
After a moment, her forward motion stopped.
“I’m stuck. You’re going to have to push.”
Mark immediately grabbed her back and started guiding it forward.
“That’s it. A bit more.”
Just as her head got all the way through, Mark heard a sharp metallic sound.
“What is that?” he asked, even though, in his gut, he knew what it was.
“Oh Christ,” said the other guy, “it’s the brakes!”
Another crack. This time the elevator lurched slightly.
“Get out! We’ve got to get out!” He started to push Ella forward.
Ella screamed, “I can’t move!”
Mark noticed that her neck was stuck in the gap—the doors had closed slightly, and now it was too narrow for either her head or her shoulders. Undaunted, he kept pushing, but her shoulders simply were not going to get through.
A third crack.
Then a fourth.
This time, Mark’s stomach slammed into his throat. The elevator free-fell downward.
But this time, he didn’t scream.
He couldn’t.
But he did hear Ella scream.
And that was
why Mark could not scream, because he realized that Ella’s head and arm were still jutting out into the third floor even as the elevator was about to plunge past that floor.
Then it stopped.
Again, Mark was knocked to the floor, but the fall wasn’t as bad, as he had already been kneeling down. He quickly looked over to see that Ella was still lying on the floor. The elevator was now fully on the third floor, the bottom of the elevator even with the third-floor elevator bay.
A wave of relief washed over Mark at the sound of Ella’s voice. It was barely above a whisper, but at least she still had a head with which to form the words.
“Pull me back.”
The words were barely audible, but it was enough to spur both Mark and the other man to action. They pulled on her legs, trying to get her back within the comparatively safe confines of the elevator.
“Comparatively” being the operative word. Was anyplace in the Hive truly safe? Dead bodies in the next elevator over. Dead bodies in the elevator bay. Who knew how many other dead bodies?
This was just a fire drill.
Wasn’t it?
Suddenly, Mark found it hard to breathe. And there was an odd smell in the air.
“Push her out of the way,” the other guy said. “We’ve gotta get out!”
But Mark was having trouble breathing—and it had nothing to do with his state of fear. This was more than that. He had a tightness in his chest.
“Pull me back inside!”
Ella was screaming now. Mark looked down to see that her head was still wedged between the doors. The other guy was making a half-hearted effort to pull the doors apart, but he was overcome by a coughing fit.
Mark tried to move over to the doors to help, but he couldn’t make his limbs work properly.
Then his stomach lurched downward. The elevator was moving upward.
Again, Ella screamed.
Mark Torvaldsen would spend the rest of his life hearing the squelching sound of flesh and bone being crushed as the floor of the elevator and the upper portion of the third-floor elevator doorframe passed each other, severing Ella’s head from the rest of her body in as grisly a manner as possible.
Luckily for Mark, the rest of his life was only a few more seconds. He could now taste the gas in the air, even as breathing became more and more impossible.
His last thoughts were regret that he wouldn’t be able to invite Ella to Bad Movie Night.
EIGHT
“SORRY ABOUT LAST NIGHT,” DR. MARIANO Rodriguez said, as if that made everything better.
Dr. Anna Bolt scowled at him as she entered the elevator that would take them down to the viral lab where they both worked. He was standing there waiting in the car, holding a cup of coffee in his hand, just as she was. They both took their coffee with cream and Sweet ’N Low—not Equal or sugar—which was something she once found endearing. Next to him stood their lab tech, Johnny-Wayne Carlson, who was holding a plate containing food for the rabbits they were experimenting on.
Mariano—or “Mo,” as she called him whenever she wanted to annoy him, like, say, right now—had that mischievious smile on his face. It was the most adorable sight in all creation when they first started working together. Now, after three straight broken dates, it mostly made her want to punch him. Repeatedly.
Johnny-Wayne, on the other hand, was just smiling like a normal person. Once, Anna had asked Johnny-Wayne why he was smiling all the time in the lab, and he said, “ ’Cause I usually gotta pay good money for theater like what you two give me for free every day.”
Anna was glad that somebody was getting entertainment out of it. Mariano was a brilliant biologist, a damn good-looking man, and fabulous in bed. He also had the emotional maturity of a particularly troubled nine-year-old, only with less couth.
Their first date wasn’t really a date as such. He came to her apartment, they ripped each others’ clothes off, and had several hours of the best sex Anna had had since that amazing fling during finals week at Johns Hopkins.
Their second date, which actually involved non-work-related conversation and being out in public, was a disaster.
Every attempt at a third date had met with failure, as Mariano had managed to not show up for some lame reason or other. She was getting tired of it.
Last night had been the most recent attempt at that third date. She was left waiting at the train station half the night before she finally gave up and went back to her apartment.
As she entered the elevator, she said, “Whatever.” She faced the front of the car, her back to him.
“I’m really sorry, Anna, I just fell asleep. You know how long we’ve been working on the T-virus, and I haven’t been getting enough sleep, and—”
“I said, ‘Whatever,’ Mo.” She didn’t bother to turn around to address him.
He winced. “Do you have to call me that?”
Johnny-Wayne tried and failed to suppress a giggle.
“Show up for a date some time, and I’ll think about it,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Look, you know how hard I’ve been working, and—”
Now she did turn around, and fixed him with as withering a gaze as she could manage first thing in the morning. “Yeah, I know how hard you’ve been working, Mo. You know how I know that? I’ve been working just as hard. The same bosses that are crawling up your ass have taken up residence in mine. And yet, somehow, some way, I was able to haul myself to the train station for our date.”
“Yeah, but you’re a girl. You don’t need as much sleep.”
Anna blinked. “What?”
“They did a study. Women don’t need as much sleep as men do. It has to do with the different biological needs and differences in REM sleep. Plus there’s the estrogen factor.” Mariano spoke with the same tone of authority that he used when he was presenting a paper in his field. Of course, his field had nothing to do with the study of circadian rhythms, sleep patterns, or the effects of gender on the same.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” Anna stared at Mariano in open-mouthed stupefaction.
Johnny-Wayne was having a much harder time keeping his laughter to himself now.
Mariano broke into that stupid smile of his again. “Yeah, I am kidding. But you almost bought it, didn’t you?”
She turned back around so she didn’t have to look at him. “No.”
“Oh, come on, you bought it a little.”
“No, I really didn’t.”
“You’re no fun at all when you’re angry, you know that?”
She rolled her eyes. “That’s kind of the idea.”
The elevator stopped at their floor, and she went out ahead of him.
“Look,” he said, “I’ll make it up to you.”
“Really?” she asked dubiously.
“Yeah, really. Why don’t we meet in the cafeteria tonight for dinner?”
She sighed, brushing one of her long locks of blond hair behind her ear. “I suppose it’s a possibility.”
“Good. Ten o’clock?”
She opened the door to their lab. The late hour was necessary, given the amount of overtime they were going to need to put in. “All right, ten. But maybe I won’t show this time.”
“Why not?” Mariano asked petulantly.
“Because I’m busy.”
At that, Mariano hit her with that mischievious smile. Anna sighed, realizing that he was not going to take this seriously in the least.
But then, was there any reason to? As colleagues, they had a great deal in common. They were both bright young biologists leapfrogging their way toward the top of the field of viral research. Thanks to Umbrella’s resources, they were doing work light-years ahead of anyone else’s. In particular, they’d been taking Dr. Ashford’s work, and bringing it to a whole new level.
Unfortunately, while they were more than able to work together, and had made some fantastic breakthroughs, once you got past the shop talk, they had nothing in common. She loved chamber music; he thought
Britney Spears was deep. She loved to read American Civil War histories, Toni Morrison novels, and Agatha Christie mysteries; he found the sports pages of the Raccoon City Times to be taxing. Her definition of art was Monet; his was a Velvet Elvis.
But damn, was he good in bed.
Maybe she should just leave it at that.
Johnny-Wayne closed and sealed the door behind him, then went to feed Daffy, one of the rabbits. (Johnny-Wayne had suggested the name, saying it’d be after the cartoon character. When reminded that Daffy was the duck, and Bugs the rabbit, Johnny-Wayne shook his shaved head and said, “Damn—always get them two mixed up.” However, they stuck with the appellation.) He knelt down by Daffy’s cage—one of several along one wall—put the dish down into the slot, and watched as the white rabbit happily chowed down.
Anna and Mariano moved down the three stairs to the table in the middle of the room to get started on the day’s work.
Before she could even set her coffee down, the fire alarm went off.
“Oh, Christ,” Johnny-Wayne said, getting up from watching Daffy eat. “Not another fucking drill.”
“Great,” Anna muttered. “We’re already two days behind, now they pull this shit.”
Mariano grinned. “Hey, at least now we have an excuse. Our work’s being disrupted.”
“I’d rather just get the work done.”
She gazed almost wistfully at the slides sitting on the desk in the middle of the lab, waiting to be put under the microscope for study. After the frustrations of the previous night—waiting around for Mariano to never show up, then a restless night of very little sleep—she wanted nothing more than to throw herself into her work.
Instead, she trudged back up the three stairs that led to the door.
With a sudden clunk, the sprinkler system activated. Water—ice-cold water—burst forth from the nozzles in the ceiling.
Cold, fear-filled panic gripped Anna, as she thought there was actually a fire in the lab.
However, a quick glance around the room revealed that thought to be absurd. Hell, most of the room and the equipment in the room was made of not-remotely-flammable plastic or metal or both. Obviously that stupid little-kid computer had a glitch.
“Shit!” she exclaimed.
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