Breathe

by Christopher Fowler

  ‘What’s above us?’ asks June.

  One of the directors looks at her as if she’s mad. ‘The roof, you stupid bitch. There’s no way down from there.’

  ‘Even if we could get back down,’ June tells Miranda, ‘we still don’t have the door key.’

  ‘Then we have to make our stand here.’

  18. FRIDAY 4:28PM

  As they speak, Meera has located the service door and is stepping out onto the glass roof of the atrium, which is still slippery with pieces of shredded Clarke. The key is lying on a vast, unsupported pane of cracked glass. As Meera ventures towards it, the pane starts to splinter like ice on a lake. This isn’t in my job description, she thinks, dropping flat on the glass and starting to inch her way across it. The key seems miles away.

  Upstairs, the last stand is taking place.

  June, Ben and Miranda are as prepared as they’ll ever be. The two directors are sheltering behind them. ‘They’re coming through,’ yells June. As the remaining barrier between the sane and the insane starts to splinter, Miranda turns on the two cowering directors. ‘We should just throw you out there to die.’

  ‘Don’t do that! I’m in a position to grant promotion,’ promises some gormless-looking guy in a grey Burtons suit. ‘I’m a very powerful man!’

  Miranda looks at his groin. ‘I think you’ve pissed yourself,’ she points out.

  The other director tries to reason. ‘They’re our employees. They’ll listen to us. They’ll still recognise the voice of a superior, surely?’

  His colleague opens the door to get out. ‘Surely? Fuck you, college boy, I’m out of here!’ Then, too late, he realises what he’s done.

  The mob is through the doors now and pouring in, a screaming mass of blank-eyed workforce insanity. Ben tries to help the directors, but it’s too late. The angry horde pours in around the shattered door, falling on the two men. They set about tearing their bosses limb from limb.

  ‘Stop!’ shout the directors. ‘Think of your careers! You’ll never work in this town again! We’re in a position to grant you substantial financial awards!’ But they still die horribly. By the time their attackers have finished, the room looks like an abattoir. Ben, Miranda and June are forced to run again.

  There’s an extremely stylish Colefax & Fowler executive bathroom at the end of the corridor. The trio barricade themselves inside.

  ‘Now what do we do?’ asks Ben.

  ‘I don’t know. The doors won’t hold long.’ Miranda senses someone behind her. She slowly turns. ‘June –’

  The white-eyed June jumps onto her back with a furious scream. Ben slams them both back into the wall behind, knocking June off-balance, but she’s back on her feet in seconds and fighting viciously. She hurls Miranda aside and attacks Ben.

  June cracks Ben’s head against the sink – again – again. Water from the taps is spraying everywhere. Ben kicks June’s feet out from under her. She slips on the wet floor and is impaled by the roof of her mouth on one of the taps. Red water pumps from her lips.

  ‘Jesus – June –’ Ben fearfully examines June’s eyes. ‘It’s some final stage of poisoning.’

  ‘The air – the ventilation shaft goes all the way down, doesn’t it?’ Miranda looks up at the wall ventilation unit. Ben climbs up onto a sink and starts hammering at the grille, but it’s sealed shut. He desperately looks around the bathroom. As the shouts outside get louder, he grabs one of the heavy cistern lids and starts slamming it into the grille.

  It bursts open just as the bathroom door starts coming apart. He pushes Miranda up, and then climbs in after her.

  They start along the wide pipe, which meets up with the main ventilator shaft – a sheer vertiginous drop of hundreds of feet. The only way down is via a thin steel maintenance ladder. Above, they can hear the nightmarish sounds of the invading workers.

  Miranda stops dead. ‘I can’t do it, Ben, not again. I’ve got no strength left.’

  ‘You have to,’ he says simply. He attempts to carry her, but she’s awkward and nervous. He slips and falls. They land on the outcrop of another shaft twelve feet down.

  He doggedly picks her up, but finds he’s damaged his leg badly. Above them, the first of the crazed workers – could it be Mr Beamish from Costings and Estimates? – arrives through the pipe and plunges past them into the shaft. As he falls, he makes a grab for Miranda and very nearly pulls her in with him, but Ben hangs onto her for dear life. She leads the way down – but the section of ladder suddenly ends. It’s a distance of at least twenty feet to where the next section starts.

  ‘That’s it,’ says Ben, ‘We’re screwed.’

  ‘At least we were going down this time.’

  There’s a tunnel opening to their left. It’s a swing and a drop, but now they’re beyond caring for their own safety. Ben kicks out the grating at the end of it.

  They land in the corridor of the deserted ninth floor, and head toward the stairwell. Ben can barely walk. Somewhere above them are eerie booms and screams, all manner of mayhem.

  At least the coast looks clear. They continue their descent through smoke, past smaller fires. Shadowy figures dash past ahead. They are in still in the realm of nightmares. Eight floors, one after the other. There’s hardly anyone left alive, and certainly no-one sane.

  On the ground floor of the stairwell, someone emerges very slowly and silently from the shadows. His face is blackened with ash, and his wide eyes are a hard, dead white. He learned stealth from an early age. There’s nothing like inherited wealth for instilling guile. A huge hunting rifle is beside him, an extension of his arm.

  Dr Samphire might not realise it, but he’s showing how he earned his nickname of Dracula.

  Ben and Miranda hobble down the stairs. Above them, crazies are starting to spill into the stairwell. The frenzied staffers are gaining on them. In great pain, Ben drags himself on, with Miranda trying to speed him up.

  ‘We won’t be able to get out at the bottom,’ he shouts.

  ‘What the fuck else can we do?’ she yells. ‘You want to stay up there and die?’

  They reach the staircase above the ground floor of the stairwell. Dr Samphire slinks back into the shadows, watching and waiting for his moment.

  They start running through the darkened ground floor. Ahead, its doors wide open, is the great glass atrium with its tropical forest of real and fake plants.

  They look up and are amazed to see that the key is still there on the atrium roof. A few feet away from it is Meera, stranded on crazed patterns of cracked glass. She’s almost there, but can go no further.

  As Ben and Miranda run into the atrium, Dr Samphire steps from between the lurid artificial palm trees, the rifle across his chest. He’s making a last stand in the business jungle.

  They can’t go forward – and, thanks to the angry mob pouring into the ground floor behind them, they can’t go back.

  ‘Well, well.’ Dr Samphire doesn’t look at all happy with them. ‘Disruption, chaos, anarchy, disorder. Another great temple of commerce brought to its knees by people who don’t know the meaning of an honest day’s work. I hope you’re very pleased with yourselves.’ He walks toward them calmly, raising the rifle high. Think of them as deer, he tells himself, or grouse. Ben tries to get out of the way, but his leg lets him down and he falls.

  The chairman fires the rifle. The bullet splinters a palm trunk. There is an ominous creaking noise. It grows, accompanied by a great rustling.

  ‘You can’t build the world by yourselves, so you come to us and whine when it doesn’t turn out how you wanted,’ the Chairman continues. ‘You’re shocked because people want to make money from your ideas. You half-heartedly try to stop them, picketing the headquarters of McDonald’s or Coca Cola. You forget that the world prefers standardisation and dull efficiency. It’s what your average, telly-ogling proles crave most of all, something boring that does the job and never changes, and they’re prepared to give up most of their rights to get it.’

 
; Ben and Miranda are frozen on the spot. Ben looks up and sees that Meera is still reaching for the key.

  Dr Samphire follows his eyeline and aims the rifle at the girl on the roof. He wishes he’d brought his glasses with him. He fires. Meera falls in an explosion of glass and with a cry of: ‘Jesus Bollocks Son Of A Bitch, not again!’

  Ben and Miranda pull Meera from fake ferns and polystyrene-ball earth. As Dr Samphire takes aim once more, he is joined by Fitch and Half-Swan. What a trio they make.

  ‘It always comes down to this,’ he tells them. ‘Management versus the workforce. Compared with the next generation of wage-slaves, we’re radical socialists.’ Dr Samphire splits the palm trunk again with his rifle shot. He fires at his staff as they break through into the undergrowth.

  Management picks its targets. Fitch attacks Miranda. Half-Swan goes for Ben. Dr Samphire goes after Meera.

  Ben’s had enough of his half-supervisor. ‘Let’s see what you’re made of,’ he suggests, thrusting his hand up inside Half-Swan and pulling down hard. Swan screams, and Ben swings him around, knocking his brains out on a painted concrete tree trunk.

  Ben feels better. Killing someone seems to have cleared his head. ‘Anybody else want a piece?’ he asks, over-confidently.

  Miranda tackles Fitch, slamming her to the ground. ‘You know,’ she tells her, ‘we could have been friends if you hadn’t tried so hard to be one of the boys.’ She slugs her as you would a man, a one-two shot, first one hard in the stomach then a haymaker to the chin, sending her flying off into the bushes and out for the count. ‘I saw that in a Tarantino film,’ she explains proudly.

  Dr Samphire comes after Meera, and gets a clear shot. Meera is against a wall – there’s nowhere left to run.

  The Chairman points accusingly. ‘You – you’re the worst. When we had an Empire, we owned people like you. And this – this – is the thanks we get.’

  He goes to fire, but Meera is free to unleash her formidable martial skills, fairly flying at him with her feet and catching him under the chin. Dr Samphire is fast, though. He has the rifle back in his cradled arm in seconds. Ben knows the Chairman can take them out. He has to do something drastic.

  Ben steps forward and raises a placating hand, as Miranda shouts at him.

  ‘This is what I wanted, Miranda,’ he says. ‘I told you that, the first day. I’m with you, Dr Samphire. Let me help you, and together we can get SymaxCorp back on track.’ He walks over to Dr Samphire’s side and takes a stand against Miranda and Meera. They can’t believe what they’re seeing.

  The Chairman loves moments like this in the business world. It makes him proud to have been an advisor to both Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair. ‘You chose the victorious side, son. Most sensible. It proves that even someone like you can become a captain of industry.’

  As soon as he is close enough, Ben reaches over and grabs the barrel of Dr Samphire’s rifle.

  The weapon goes off, skimming Ben’s arm to plant a third split in the fake palm behind him.

  As Ben drops, the great tree comes down. It was never meant to withstand gunfire. As it falls, its concrete sections break apart. The top piece lands squarely on Dr Samphire’s head, pulverising his skull into a skillet of bone, pounding him into the ground.

  Miranda runs to Ben’s side as the deranged Bedlamites, no longer held back by the stand-off, pour into the atrium.

  ‘Fucking arseholes.’ Meera has taken to swearing a lot lately. ‘Time to go. Did Howard say whether or not the cable tunnel connected to the outside?’

  Meera locates the recycling door to the outside world and finds that it’s not welded shut after all. Perhaps that was just another lie they fed Howard. Exhausted, they drag themselves inside the tunnel.

  Meera checks her watch as they are chased through the claustrophobic tunnel, the mob grabbing and clawing at them. Almost five, nearly time to go home, she can’t help thinking. She’s always been a city girl.

  They emerge, bloodied, burned, scarred, half-naked, in the light of a blazing, blood-red sunset. The rain has stopped. They look back to see the white-eyed staff falling back from the bright tunnel exit like roaches.

  ‘I don’t think they want to breathe normal air any longer,’ says Meera. ‘The doctored stuff is addictive, after all. They’ll have to stay inside.’

  Behind them, above them, crazed workers hammer silently on the building windows. Something flares and explodes deep inside – but the outside world fails to notice. The tower has become a permanent monument to synaptic disorder, horror, misery, chaos. Perhaps, on a lesser scale, it always was.

  ‘I think maybe it’s time to give up my desk job,’ says Meera.

  Miranda wipes her face. ‘Yeah, this won’t look too good on your CV.’

  They are walking away, they are free, they are safe … until the tunnel exit bursts open behind them, and a hundred desperate hands claw out. Somehow – they don’t know how it happens, it’s something that will haunt them forever – some of the hands seize Ben’s jacket, and he is hauled back inside. Ben fights furiously as the tunnel shadows swallow him, until he can fight no more. He allows himself to be carried back, all the way into the building’s dark heart.

  Miranda’s screams frighten seagulls above the river.

  Meera is forced to pull her away from the outer wall. Around them, home-going commuters move in a solid river, barely pausing to give them notice.

  A passing drone complains on his mobile: ‘I’m going to have to cancel. I just had a really tough day at work.’ Meera shoots him a look. She finds herself still holding Ben’s tie. Sadly, she drops it into a nearby litter bin.

  Miranda is crying hard. ‘Poor Ben,’ she says, ‘it was the thing he most wanted.’ She doesn’t seem able to stop the ragged sobs. ‘He wanted to be like everyone else in the city.’

  The limping, wounded pair gradually merge with the flow of people.

  FIVE MONTHS LATER

  In the smart, white corporate office, the board meeting comes to an end.

  One of the US executives is wrapping up his presentation. ‘Due to the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the closure of our London office,’ he announces, ‘worldwide operations will now be based here in Chicago. The investigation has revealed much that we can learn from past mistakes, and we are completely satisfied that it’s impossible for such a problem to arise again. Additionally, I am pleased to announce that SymaxCorp Environment Systems has been awarded the chance to pitch for contracts across all US government buildings.’ The office rings to the sound of polite applause.

  ONE YEAR AND THREE MONTHS LATER

  In the Oval Office of the White House, the President pores over papers on his desk. Above him, tiny air vents open, and there’s a gentle, almost comforting hiss. The new unit above his head has a steel label on the edge of the grille. It reads: SYMAXCORP USA.

  The President likes it when the fresh air starts up. He always seems to get so much more done. Humming softly to himself, he turns his attention back to the plans for North Korea.

  Also Available from Andrews UK and Telos Publishing