by Bryan James
Unlike the rest of the minions on night watch, Rajesh was allowed foliage, and a veritable cornucopia of pothos plants surrounded the diminutive man as he glared back at Louis, resenting the suggestive nickname they had given him early in their tenure together. Ironically, Louis wasn’t quite sure whether Rajesh understood the sexual connotations intended by Bridget when she created it—based entirely on the way he pronounced his R’s. No, Louis was pretty sure that the man simply took umbrage with the lack of respect for his authority.
“Nothing yet, but I’m sure it’s just temporary. I’m going to go to the front desk and ask security.” He turned the corner to leave his cube, and remembered Louis’ second question abruptly. “No, you …”
He paused, realizing he should make the announcement louder, and for broader distribution. He raised his voice, projecting over the cubicle walls, his accent and high-pitched voice familiar to all the workers.
“No one leaves. As far as you are all concerned, this is temporary. I will find out what happened. Stay at your desks and do not panic. We must keep the queue times to a minimum.”
He turned on his heel, his portly frame bouncing slightly under the brisk pace and Louis frowned at the officiousness of the small, contemptible man.
From the area where the personal bankers worked, Louis heard someone throw back loud enough to be audible, but soft enough not to carry to Rajesh.
“Did he say stare at your breasts and call a mechanic?”
The section laughed nervously, indulging in the favorite pastime of mocking the man’s accent as an impotent way to rebel against his meager authority. Louis chuckled, reaching into his own pocket as he did so, just to confirm he didn’t have a data signal either. He switched on the data function and held the phone up in the air, searching for a signal.
No bars.
He wandered to the next aisle, still trying.
No joy.
The building sucked cell phone batteries for breakfast if you didn’t turn off your data plan when you got there. Your phone would spend hours trying to detect a signal if you left your wireless data on—the solid cement structure with its thick, windowless walls wasn’t accommodating to cellular reception.
From the customer service section four rows over, Louis heard a voice rise above the chatter.
“Anyone got cell coverage?” It was a large hispanic man with a friendly voice—Antonio, Louis thought. His tall frame rose from beyond the cubicle walls, raising a corded phone in one hand. “These lines are dead. The hard lines, I mean.”
Louis raised his eyebrows in the red-tinged darkness. That was strange. A power outage shouldn’t cut the phones. He glanced toward the front of the building, looking for any sign of Rajesh.
“Nah, got nothin’ here,” replied Cam, as Bridget shook her head. “Maybe out front?”
As Cam’s last word left his mouth, a hollow pounding sounded faintly in the distance. It was sporadic, and inconsistent, as if someone were pounding on a piece of metal or wood with a solid object.
“Good, someone’s on it,” said Bridget dismissively, turning to Cam. “Want to play gin?”
***
They started to collapse amid the rush of society, bodies falling into lunches and streets, in conferences and showers, during meetings and on buses, while onlookers recoiled from the spectacle.
In cities throughout the country, the cases began as isolated calls to 911. Frightened people calling professionals for an answer.
Clearly, these people were sick.
At first, the first responders called it the flu. No one else had a better idea.
The doctors were stumped.
They had never seen anything like it.
And they never would again.
***
Louis sat at his desk for fifteen minutes, listening to Cam and Bridget argue over the rules of gin, and slightly enjoying his break as he simply zoned out. In the distance, the hammering was a constant sound, and after a while, Louis began to wonder if there was someone trapped somewhere. Rising from his chair and past the still-arguing Cam and Bridget, Louis walked slowly to the end of the aisle, starting toward the front entrance, where the security booth was located next to the front door. Across the open space, several others from the phone customer service were circling their chairs in the aisle, chatting and cracking jokes. The building was eerily quiet with the power out, and he missed the hum of the electronics and the buzzing of the cheap, energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs.
Suddenly, a large form appeared in front of him, a hand reaching out as he stumbled in surprise. A strong grip seized his arm, pulling him forward.
“Whoa, man. I work here. It’s aight.” Antonio’s huge form materialized clearly in the damnable red light and Louis took a deep breath, smiling in relief.
“Yeah, sorry dude. Just a little on edge. Something about this …”
“Doesn’t feel right? Yeah, man. I hear ya. Headin’ up front?”
Louis nodded. “Seems like maybe they have a television or something in there. Worst case, we can grab a cell signal maybe?”
Antonio cocked his head to the side and smiled. “My thoughts exactly. Let’s see what’s to see.”
The red lights bathed the mundane cubes in a surreal glow. It was a hellish landscape of a different sort, with the red color lending a flaming indictment to the hell that was cube-dwelling. Louis almost expected a comically overdressed devil figure to emerge from one of the large corner units, small plastic horns crookedly proclaiming its identity as the king of the underworld. The empty units, however, remained quiet, bathing in the red glow of the dim lights as he and Antonio passed quickly, their steps making only the small sound that thick rubber soles make on cheap industrial-grade carpet.
The entrance to the building was a stand-alone vestibule. A large doorway opened into a smaller rectangle with metal detectors on both ends, and the blacked out doorways beyond. The thick metal of the reinforced entrance doors was recessed in the cement walls. On one side of the small room, a thick glass booth normally contained a security officer in a well-lit fish-tank, monitors glowing happily on all sides.
Today, as they approached, they could see that the power was out in the booth as well, a red floodlight filling the darkness inside. The exterior doors, of course, were shut. Antonio even tried the handles, but shrugged when they wouldn’t open.
“Musta locked ‘em for some reason,” he suggested, nodding toward the guard booth.
Louis turned, eyes scanning the interior of the booth for signs of the sole security officer that worked the nights with them. Tonight, it had been Tiny—the massively obese and ironically nicknamed man who sat every evening looking so forlornly at the attractive women that passed his booth. Louis caught himself hoping that nothing had happened to the man, then asked himself why he thought anything had happened.
He had no answer. Just a feeling.
“Any sign of them in there?” asked Antonio, walking quietly across the linoleum entranceway and scanning the doors once more. In the red glow, his slightly lined face looked solemn and concerned.
“Nothing. No power in the guard booth either, which is weird. I mean, shouldn’t the booth here have some sort of back up?”
Antonio nodded and put his hands to the glass, cupping his eyes and scanning the room.
“You try the door?” he asked, leaning back from the wall and moving toward the large metal door marked “Authorized Entry Only.” Louis stepped forward, putting his hand on the handle and pushing it down. It clicked loudly, the lever-type handle moving only a fraction of a millimeter before stopping. It was locked.
“Well, shit. Okay.” Antonio put his hands on his hips as Louis looked back into the large warehouse of a building from the doorway. In the far distance, he could see shadows in the red light as the small groups moved against the flood lights and emergency beams.
“What about the break room?” Louis asked, wondering absently if the two men had gone upstairs to try for cellular recep
tion in the small, dingy employee lounge.
“Worth a shot,” said Antonio, and he smiled quickly. “I could use a soda.”
They made their way to the main staircase, which ran along the nearest wall and led to the upper floor of the building. Nearly as large as the bottom floor, it was unoccupied during the night shift, but was the only area in the building that had anything approaching a lounge. A small, windowless room in the middle of the top floor with one microwave, one fridge, and three small tables, all for hundreds of employees. It was a masterpiece of a design flaw, and one that you quickly learned to cope with by bringing lukewarm lunches and living with cold coffee. But it was the only room in the building with a view of the outside. In the very center of the small room, recessed deeply into the ceiling, was a single, two foot by two foot skylight, that was famous for its cellular signal-permitting attributes. If the two men had gone anywhere, it would have been this room.
They reached the top of the stairs and paused. This floor was darker than the first, as few lights were active. Possibly due to the reduced occupancy at night, or preprogrammed to dim on motion sensors. Whatever it was, they stumbled to find the straight, somewhat wider pathway through the maze of human rat traps to the small lounge. Louis cursed once as he tripped on what resembled a dying ficus plant and nearly swallowed the edge of the closest cube. He caught himself, hand grabbing the edge of the wall and shaking the cubicle loudly. On the desk, a book fell against the hard plastic desktop and the crack of plastic on plastic made Antonio jump and turn around.
“What?” asked Louis, defensive about his perennial clumsiness. He had never been an athlete or, for that matter, anything remotely approaching an athlete. He didn’t play sports, and he didn’t work out. He didn’t sweat, unless the club where his favorite band was playing was too hot. He didn’t jog or power walk or rollerblade. He just sat. All day, every day. On the weekdays, he sat at work. On the weekends, he sat in front of the television, or at the coffee shop, or in the pub.
Antonio shook his head and kept walking, his hands held out to his sides. As they reached the dark mass in the center of the large room where the blurred view of the rest of the building was blocked by the lounge, Louis spoke loudly.
“Yo, Voj. You in there, man? What’s the story?”
Antonio stopped walking, waiting for an answer. From ahead, the silence was dead and ominous.
“Hey Rajesh, you in here? Answer me, dude. We’re getting a little concerned here. Why are the doors locked down? I’d call this a little bit of a fire risk, wouldn’t you?” Louis kept walking until he got to the break room, which was illuminated inside by a single, dull red emergency light. Immediately, his eyes were drawn to the sky light, which simply reflected a dark sky above. Nothing in the room was amiss. No spilled water or coffee, no burned food, nothing at all to indicate anyone had been there recently. Antonio followed Louis in and crossed his arms as he leaned against the door frame, his back to the large room behind him.
“Well, I guess they ain’t up here,” he said, scanning the room from top to bottom, eyes lingering on the open window.
As he finished his sentence, they both jerked their heads to the side as they heard the clear sound of someone walking slowly toward them through the cubicles on the other side of the break room. Instinctively, they went silent, moving through the small room to the doorway, and peering into the darkness. Beyond the first row of cubes, the outline of a clumsy form was visible against the bright light of an emergency flood. The person’s hands flailed out to the sides, and it limped slightly, making its way forward, toward where they stood.
“Rajesh?” said Louis, eyes narrowing in the low light to try to pick out the form.
Suddenly, the unknown walker stumbled and fell, leaving their field of vision. Louis shot forward, eager to know who it was and what they were doing. Behind him, Antonio’s footsteps followed. Louis turned the corner of the last cube and saw the sprawled form and stepped back, disgusted.
“Damn it, Cam. What the hell, man?”
The skinny form on the floor twitched once, and sat up slowly, holding his shin and breathing heavily through his teeth.
“What? You’re the only ones allowed to leave the crypt down there?”
He made a pained face and rocked on his bony ass, like a child who had fallen from his bike.
“I told you, man. Don’t call it that. I hate that shit. I get claustrophobic.” Louis resisted the urge to kick the young man, and backed up, offering a hand instead. “What are you doing?”
“Same thing as you Hardy Boys, looking for a cell signal.” He pulled himself up, and pushed his greasy hair from his eyes.
Louis, stunned momentarily by the reference to the Hardy Boys, stuttered even as Antonio filled in. “Good idea, but we were actually looking for Rajesh and Tiny. You see any sign of them on the other stairwell?”
Cam snorted as he limped toward the break room. “Voj and Tiny, huh? That’s a power couple from hell, huh? Naw, nothing. Stairwell’s dark as shit, too. Only one light on in there. That’s how I hit my other shin.” He looked back over his shoulder at them as he crossed into the break room. “You guys get a signal?” He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped several keys quickly.
“We didn’t have time …”
“Yeah, I got something. Hold up.” He was in the techno-zone now, and Louis knew better than to try to break through to him. He waved off Antonio, and even in the dim light, he could tell that Antonio understood.
He watched as Cam squinted and tapped, moving the phone around in odd positions, and finally reaching up toward the skylight in the ceiling.
“Got something,” he said, and Louis watched over his shoulder as Cam dialed a number and put the phone on speaker.
“All circuits … busy now … back again.” The robotic female voice was crackly and insistent, and Cam tried calling three more times before flipping into text mode, tapping a quick message to a friend. The message loaded slowly, then beeped once, a small red exclamation point appearing next to the outbound message.
“Shit, man. I don’t know. The cell network’s wonky.” Cam said, punching the send button again for good measure.
Suddenly, Louis remembered something he had heard on the radio. Some guy had been trapped in his car during an avalanche, and his phone wouldn’t make a call. But he had internet service because the two services were different networks. When the first responders got to him, he was updating his status on social media and even posted a picture of them getting through the snow.
“You got data on that?” Louis asked, and received a withering look from Cam.
“Dude, seriously? How do you think I check the game center leader boards and my Twitter account? Come on.” Suddenly Cam’s eyes widened in understanding.
“Right, gotcha. Hold up.” He punched a series of buttons and exclaimed briefly. “I’ve got a signal!”
Antonio’s voice sounded from near the vending machine, where he had been examining the meager offerings.
“Check the local news first, see if there’s anything. Maybe a tornado or something?”
Cam nodded and punched the application icon on his home screen. Louis watched as the internet browser loaded the front page of the local news, and backed up as Cam shifted to follow a stronger signal, moving out of Louis’ view.
“What the …?” Cam’s voice was bewildered and confused, and his finger tapped the screen once to zoom in.
“What, Cam?” Louis was anxious and tired. Two AM was two AM, no matter what hours you worked, and he was starting to grow concerned.
“God damn it, I can’t get the connection to load the page… Hold on, that might … What the…?” Cam’s voice was quiet and slightly disbelieving.
His eyes were flying over the words, his finger scrolling quickly. Behind him, Antonio shifted his weight audibly and inhaled slowly.
“Dude, out with it for fuck’s sake!” said Louis, his voice tinged with the anxiety he felt so strongly.
“That’s it,” he said, looking at them. “God damned phone decided it needed to reload the page and I lost what I had.”
There was a moment of silence as all three men digested the limited news.
Then, Antonio exhaled in frustration and cursed under his breath, even as Louis slapped Cam on the shoulder to get his attention, “Come on Cam, reload the page. This can’t be because of some bird flu shit. What the fuck is happening out there?”
“Dude. Seriously. That’s all I got. The first paragraph is still cached though, I can show you…” His voice crackled slightly. His finger was scrolling through a half-empty page as Louis craned his neck to read over his shoulder. The internet connection bar slowly crept to the right, indicating a slow page load.
“God damn it, Cam…”
“See for yourself, man,” he said almost frantically, voice fearful as he shoved the phone at Louis. Louis took the phone, shaking his head as he stared at the small text, only half loaded on the small screen.
The story was one of only partial information. Cam had only been able to save a quarter of the page from being deleted by his phone’s automatic refresh, and the news was incomplete and fragmented. A sickness of some sort, people falling down, and people dying. Overloaded hospitals and a spreading contagion. Spreading fast.
That’s where the story stopped, mid-sentence.
Louis looked up, and his heart started racing.
This was impossible.
***
The cases were no longer isolated. In cities across the country, hospitals reported mass casualties on an epic scale. Vomiting, nausea and fever were the first symptoms, then unconsciousness. Then, ultimately, death.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. That was just the beginning.