by mike Evans
He turned on his heels, sprinting through the open door opposite the maintenance room. Piles of sheet rock were stacked neatly below the large windows overlooking the dying city. Tools scattered across the dusty floor, thrown haphazardly amongst the construction material. Bright orange extension cords lay coiled up in one corner of what was supposed to have been an expansion of Jared’s company offices.
Grabbing one of the coils, he sped back to the utility room door. He prayed that the darkness inside the room would mask the threat those inside were facing for just a little while longer.
Any qualms he would have had about his own actions died the second he was tossed atop the remains of his coworkers. Everyone was gone. Ken was dead. All the people he worked with, the people who gave his life value, were dead. The true monsters were inside that dark room, and had killed everyone he cared about with their cowardice.
“Hey, Robert?” Jared called through the door, looping the cord around the handle and tying a tight knot.
“Is that you, Mr. Architect?” Robert’s muffled voice came from within the room. “You should probably hide before you get eaten!”
“I know you killed Linda,” Jared called out. “I know every one of you in there knows it, too.” He stretched the cord toward the other side of the hall, where an office space sat unoccupied. Jared fed the cord into the room, closing the door on it to keep it secured.
“I don’t think so, Mr. Architect,” Robert laughed.
“My name is Jared. I suppose you’re not smart enough to remember my name though. If you were, you’d be doing something other than cleaning my toilet.”
“Fuck you, Jared!” Robert shouted, his fist slamming against the door. “I hope those things are coming for you right now. I want to hear you screaming when they eat you!”
“I think you have bigger problems, Mr. Janitor,” Jared smiled.
“That’s funny, since you’re the one locked out of here,” Robert laughed.
“No, you’re the one that’s locked in,” Jared said as he strummed the taut cord. It hummed as it vibrated like a guitar string.
“What the…” Robert stuttered as he tried to open the door again. The cord held fast as he tried again and again to force the door open.
“Wait for it …” Jared said, leaning his shoulder against the wall.
“Wait for what?” Robert laughed. “For the things out there to have a harder time getting to us? Your plan has a few holes in it.”
“Uh-huh,” Jared smiled, suddenly realizing that he was shaking with excitement. He simply waited, and listened.
“You’re still out there, aren’t you Mr. Architect.”
“I sure am Mr. Shit Cleaner.”
“You know, when we get out of here, I’m going to come after you.”
“You know you’re never getting out of there, right?” Jared laughed.
“I’m coming for you. You think whatever you’ve tied to this door will keep us all in forever? We’ll get out.”
“Not forever,” Jared sighed. “Just for a few more minutes.”
“Open this fucking door!” Robert shouted.
“I don’t think so, Mr. Shit Cleaner. You see, I just don’t like you.”
“Don’t be fucking cute with me! You open this goddamn …”
A shrill piercing scream tore through the room, interrupting Robert mid-thought. The woman continued to cry out in agony as a gurgling snarl rose inside the room.
“Get it off her!” Gary shouted.
“Get what off her?” Barb screamed. “What’s going on?! I can’t see anything!”
“It bit me!” Kelly screamed. “My leg! It won’t let go! Help m …” Kelly’s words were cut off by another round of fresh cries.
“Open this fucking door, Jared!” Robert shouted. The extension cord held firm as he frantically pulled at the door.
“Oh, you remember my name, Robert?” Jared chuckled.
“Let us out of here, you fuck!” Robert grew even more frantic, kicking and slapping at the door. “Please, man. You can’t let us die like this!”
“I can’t?”
“You do this and you’re a murderer!”
“I’m already a murderer,” Jared sighed. “That’s something you did get right. I locked my friends out because you people forced my hand. I killed them. But you killed Linda, and you killed my best friend. If you’re looking for mercy from me, you’re barking up the wrong tree.”
A distinctly male growl erupted from within. A deep sorrow washed over Jared as he thought of what his friend was becoming. He wanted to do something to let Ken rest in peace, but he had no idea how. How does one kill something that’s already dead?
Gary suddenly wailed in anguish, his cries drowning out the other screams floating through the darkness inside the room.
“My balls! He bit my fucking balls!” Gary shrieked. “Please Jared, you can’t do this to us!”
“You did it to me. You tossed me out. You left me to die,” Jared said, resting his forehead on the cool wall.
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” Robert screamed. “Open this goddamn door!”
Shadows appeared at the end of the corridor, swaying back and forth like drunks staggering out of a bar after last call. Jared narrowed his eyes, peering through the limited light to try and catch a glimpse of the shuffling dead.
Pinpricks danced across his skin as the first creature came into view. The orange glow streaming in through the outside windows glistened against the exposed muscle on his former manager’s throat. He staggered forward, eyes staring off into nothingness. His arms hung at his sides, swaying loosely as his feet shuffled across the stained carpeting. He chewed on a bright red ribbon of flesh hanging from his blood painted lips.
“Thank you, Robert,” Jared said as he righted himself. “Thank you for making so much noise. I didn’t know if they could still hear or not.”
Robert did not hear him over the curses he vomited out aimed at Jared. The cacophony of painful wails grew louder as Robert wildly attacked the door, desperately trying to force his way out.
Jared turned to flee back into the empty office space when he suddenly stopped. He lowered his head, allowing himself to feel the sorrow of his lost friend one last time. “Goodbye Ken,” he whispered.
He took a firm grip on the cord and opened the door to the empty space. Instantly, the pressure from Robert’s attack almost ripped the electrical cord from his hands. Jared looped the cord around his hand, using his body weight to be sure Robert would not be able to pull it from his hands and free himself. Slowly, Jared backed his way into the empty office, and once again he closed the door on the cord, securing it. Jared sat on the dust covered floor, ensuring that he was completely out of sight, and he waited.
It did not take long. Soon the screams coming from the pitch black maintenance room were drowned out by the excited growls of the growing mob outside. They bumped against the taut cord, until Jared feared that it would come loose.
He listened to the ever increasing mob until it sounded as if the entire population of the seventh floor stood just outside of where he sat. Over it all, he could still hear Robert screaming profane laced protests as he attacked the door.
Jared counted to ten, and cracked his door open. The electrical cord immediately zipped through the crack, the plug cracking Jared across his teeth. Warm blood trickled across his lips and down his chin, but he paid little attention to it.
A chorus of terror erupted just outside of where Jared sat. Pleas for mercy and cries for help filled the seventh floor as the dead poured into the maintenance closet. Ear piercing screams bellowed out from the room as the creatures tore into their victims. Jared listened as cloth and flesh was torn from living screaming people.
He felt no more remorse than he would at stepping on an ant. He killed everyone in the room behind him, and he knew he should feel guilt over what he had done. But he simply no longer cared. He just sat back and listened to them die.
He ticked
off the minutes, cracking his door open every couple of minutes to peer out into the bloodbath. The dead had pushed their way into the room, falling on their writhing victims with teeth bared.
As soon as he saw his chance, he leapt to his feet and sped out the door. The last of the creatures standing in the hall had pushed their way into the utility room. He bounded across the corridor, grabbing the cord still attached to the maintenance door. With a quick tug, the door slammed shut, locking the dead and their victims inside.
Jared took a deep breath, smiling despite the horrific stench of death enveloping him. He listened to the screams of the dying as they were slowly muffled by the press of walking corpses.
Jared turned his back on the tormented and strolled back toward his office, stopping momentarily at Sally’s desk to silently apologize before heading to his own desk. Pulling one of several blueprints from a pile stacked on his work bench, he poured over the building specs again, taking all the time he needed to.
Linda was right, Jared thought as he lifted his eyes from the building plans. We just needed a solid plan to distract them.
The End
By James Dean
Last Day at Top Shelf
Floor Eight
William Allen
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment upon purchase. This eBook may not be traded or sold to other people. If you want to share this book with others, please purchase an additional copy. If you are reading this but did not purchase it, please return it to where you got it from. Thanks for respecting this author’s work.
© 2016 William Allen, All Rights Reserved
William Allen on Amazon
Floor Eight
Chapter One
Garrett checked the clock on his dual screen monitors again and sighed. Despite what his brain insisted, his traitorous eyes saw the truth. Only five minutes since he’d last checked the time. Being in the office, this office, might not be hell, but it sure seemed to resemble purgatory at times. Or what Garrett, not being Catholic, imagined that in-between place to be. No ocean of fire, but still no picnic either.
Clicking his mouse, the cubicle dweller checked his itinerary for next week once again. On the road for sales and service calls every day, he confirmed with a mixture of relief tinged with sadness. Relief because the schedule plucked him out of the cubicle farm once again, and sadness at where his life was leading him to this point. For this I studied and went to class every day, racking up student loans that rivaled a mortgage, he pondered morosely. His asshole of a father called him a glorified Maytag repair man, and Garrett had to Google the term to get the dig.
“Hey, Gar, what you doin’?”
The voice startled Paul Garrett out of his maudlin thoughts, and he jerked in shock. After nearly a year inhabiting the maze of connected workstations, or pods, that made up the bulk of the regional headquarters for Top Shelf Software’s 8-floor, the lack of anything approaching privacy remained appalling.
“Shit, Harvey, you scared me to death,” Garrett replied, trying to master his irritation. While Garrett might not fit the computer geek stereotype, Harvey Weinstein seemed to not only embrace the lifestyle, he embodied it. From faux distressed Atari tee shirt to thick, horn-rimmed glasses and the requisite shock of long, curly hair nearly qualifying for status as ‘white guy dreads’. Harvey looked like he’d just popped into the office from an all-nighter playing Halo in his grandma’s basement. As Garrett pondered the idea, it didn’t seem that far-fetched.
“Sorry, man,” Harvey apologized in a loud, obvious whisper. “These quarterly floggings just make me jumpy. Aren’t you jumpy?”
“Yeah, maybe a little bit. Not a great quarter for me, you know. A lot of market resistance out there to the new releases.”
“Don’t have to tell me,” Harvey knowingly replied. “Nobody wants to invest in the upgraded service anymore, either. Not looking forward, Gar. Not looking forward at all.”
Leaning forward, the tightly wound young man lowered his voice to a real whisper this time.
“I heard they cut Beamon yesterday, and McEntyre already this morning. Rachel told me she was walking by and happened to glance into the conference room when Kyle gave Robbie the news. He was crying, man, and that prick,” now Harvey’s voice was so low it sounded like gust of wind, and he said it again for emphasis, “that prick Stovall had the gall to make him wait in the conference room while they called security to haul him out.”
“Shit,” Garrett replied, equally softly. “Robbie’s wife just had their first kid. He won’t be able to pay for COBRA either. Not now. That’s cold.”
Honestly, Garrett wasn’t jumpy. He was terrified. Sales and service. That’s what Top Shelf provided to its customers, but not always. The company used to design cutting edge games for the PC and platform crowd. But that was then, and after the private equity firm that leveraged their way into control held the reins, those masters of business decided to go in a different direction.
Eleven months ago, Paul Garrett took the job thinking he was going to be working eighty hour weeks as part of a development team, churning code and brainstorming new apps for the up-and-coming software company. Truth be told, the market was so bad, he’d sent out over a hundred solicitations and promptly forgotten about the resume he’d sent to Top Shelf until he received their e-mail. The salary was shit, barely better than flipping burgers, truthfully. It also forced him to relocate, but Garrett saw this as a chance to get his foot in the door, and get back to doing what he did best. Programming.
Except Top Shelf didn’t actually create anything. That was their dirty and dark little secret. No, doing that would have meant paying programmers the going rate. Instead, Top Shelf outsourced those pesky creative positions to Lahore, and kept on an Action Team that was really just route salesmen and service repair technicians. Garrett was horrified, but after being out of full time work for nearly four months, he needed to pay bills.
During his orientation, the idea of actually going out to customer locations to do upgrades and repairs as well as making sales pitches seemed something out of the horse and buggy days. What about Skype, and Facetime, and the dozens of really good remote access suites out there? Heck, Top Shelf even hawked one under their banner, Picture Box, that wasn’t half bad. A little buggy, but if it wasn’t, Garrett might not have a job.
So, Garrett started making the circuit, taking up the responsibilities of another eager beaver at the company who, Garrett only found out later, left the job to join a religious commune. For real. Now Garrett was beginning to see the appeal.
He’d hated all the travel at first and resented the hours he spent off the clock driving from one flea bag motel to the next in his three state sales route. But, as a side benefit, the usually introverted techie found out that in the right setting, he actually enjoyed meeting new people and fixing their problems. Heck, at Dynamo Gym last week, he’d actually gotten a hug from the hot, spandex clad hard body girl “womanning” the front desk when he’d managed to resurrect their frozen accounting software.
Garrett actually had a hidden flair for fixing the glitches and issues for small business that formed the backbone of Top Shelf’s stated core function, but…he just wasn’t that great at peddling the company’s software.
Admittedly, he moved plenty of units. Not a ton, but he wasn’t dead last in the region. Garrett realized his problem, as was repeatedly thrown in his face at each and every quarterly meeting since his hiring. He failed to upsell Top Shelf’s brands of software. He sold plenty of licensed products, like MacAfee and Microsoft and all the household names, but not Top Shelf’s in-house products.
Why? Why was it so hard to recommend your own company’s award winning products to your customers? Garrett knew he would hear that question at least a dozen times today from Kyle Stovall, his interface coordinator.
Interface coordinator? Why couldn’t they call him sales supervisor, or some such? Or simply, boss? Stovall, in addition to running this regional office
, also served as interface coordinator for the traveling technicians. For the thousandth time, Garrett wondered what overpaid, overeducated moron came up with the job titles at this company. Probably someone with a Doctorate in Human Resource Management, if such existed. And a Master’s in Business Administration. Gotta have that MBA, baby, Garrett thought sourly.
So why not push the company brand? Paul hated to be a Debbie Downer, but the truth was the truth. Because, by and large, they sucked. Cheap means cheap, and Top Shelf brass went for the lowest bidder. That might be okay if you are trying to do something easy like build the Space Shuttle or perfect a Missile Defense Shield, but to design, beta and masterpiece a program to allow pet owners to feed their dogs via computer when they are at work? Or to create an app for your phone that lets you play Top Shelf’s ten-year old pro boxing game on the touchscreen? Not so good. Garrett knew the truth. He’d examined the code and the documentation. Sloppy, substandard work.
Not that Indian software engineers didn’t know their stuff, but Top Shelf only paid the programming going rate for pizza delivery drivers, so…
“What are we doing, ladies?”
The annoying, high pitched tone was enough to identify the speaker to Garrett, and shake him out of his musings. That Harvey, facing the direction of the speaker, seemed to flinch at the words confirmed the deduction.
“Just talking about how much we are looking forward to the upcoming powwow, Brad. You know much we value the face time with Kyle,” Garrett said, using every trick he knew to tell the lie with a straight face.
Brad Downing, the twenty-three year old associate, was the undisputed sales leader for the region. Armed with a boyish charm and perfect teeth to go with a business degree, Brad was the golden child of the company. Kyle Stovall, frequent beneficiary of Brad’s consummate brown-nosing technique, had often been heard to refer to his young protégé as their first round draft pick. Which made me the backup rookie free agent kicker, Garrett thought just as frequently.