by Chris Welsh
Chapter Six. 10:30am
THE FIRST ONE. FINALLY.
Stuart zipped ahead like a small, nervous child rushing to push the elevator button before anyone else. Actually, a hell of a lot like that, what with him standing a few inches shorter than me and in the process of running to press an elevator button. When the doors didn't open immediately, he did an impatient little dance that involved rocking from foot to foot whilst blaspheming.
"Godddd fucking Jesus shits. Why is this prick of a thing never on the floor I want?" he said, elbows in the air and hands on top of his head.
Susan walked at a brisk pace but took tiny steps compared to my cocky swagger (read: bit of a wonky limp) and we caught up with him as the lift doors opened. The light inside flickered and I almost asked Susan if lifts worked like refrigerators – as in, do the lights go off when the doors closed. Luckily I caught myself before uttering a single syllable of that stupid question.
"Doors Are Open," the lift said. They were, too. It was amazing, how it said exactly what we witnessed with our eyes.
I'd prefer it if they said something like 'Shazam!' or 'Open Sesame!' or 'Welcome to Liftville!' Y'know, something a bit more scintillating than 'Doors Are Open'. 'Get the fuck in' would do. I'd encourage the thing for showing passion. For the smuttier lift user, 'I want you in me. Ride me all the way down' would be a delightful, unique attraction.
We rode the hell out of the elevator to floor nine and emerged into a mostly dark, mostly empty office. It hadn't occurred to me that each floor had a different layout and I'd expected another identikit corridor lined with small offices. This had the feel of a former call centre or something similar but with no banks of desks or computers. Aimless wires sprang from holes in the carpet like thin snakes in the world's dullest vivarium.
Chairs stood in stacks as though someone had got halfway through clearing them before giving up and going home. No fancy, wheeled computer chairs, only ones that might've been stolen from a school classroom; stiff, uncomfortable things with no padding and four thin legs. The type I spent my childhood irrationally terrified of getting in my eye.
I suffered recurring dreams where I, for some reason, lay on the floor of a classroom staring up at the stucco ceiling, until a mouth-breathing classmate shifted and a chair leg wound up resting on my eyelid. Before I could move they would plant themselves down and I'd wake up screaming and prodding my eyeball to make sure it was still there. When I brought up the significant danger these chairs possessed, my teacher burst out laughing and had to leave the room for fifteen minutes. The next day, someone pushed tennis balls on each leg of my chair. I almost wanted to engineer the scenario to prove how dangerous it was, but I didn't fancy dying and no one else was up for it.
Most ceiling lights lit up, some permanently, some only toying with the idea of being 'on'; the rest were dark tubes of nothing.
I wanted to ask Stuart what used to be here but he darted off, crossing the empty office in an awkward jog-walk hybrid like he'd learnt to run on a cross-trainer. He arrived at the Security room before either of us and banged on the door, shouting his partner's name and fumbling with a set of keys.
"Why's the door locked? It wasn't when I left!" he squealed. He squealed most things.
We entered the room exactly two seconds after him and I was immediately hit by a turning, screaming, running Stuart. His quick footwork would have impressed me had it not resulted in him running forehead first into my chin, the git. He bounced off but the impact knocked me from my course. I backed away from the door and shot him an accusatory glare whilst he hopped around with burning fear in his eyes. Susan peeked in. A small, nuanced expression graved her face, telling of impending trouble.
"OH MY FUCKING GOD!" she screamed.
Yeah, something was definitely up.
I had to physically push the gibbering Stuart to get to the door and investigate for myself. He dashed around a two foot by two foot square on the floor like a rabid moth with a very interesting light bulb. Upon picking up the thick, unmistakable scent of blood, I almost joined him. That iron-based stench that heightens senses and makes alarms go off in the part of the brain that controls the 'run away' function. I stepped in and glanced around, expecting to see a dead body or something more horrific; I wasn't disappointed.
I saw two.
Two very dead bodies. One motionless on the floor in a circle of blood. The other, well, not.
The other dead body was up and about, enjoying a stroll.
A male, impossible to guess age, wearing a fine striped suit all ripped and soiled by dried, brownish blood. Skin shed from every visible inch and a broken arm bent towards us when it should have been down by its side. It turned to face me, struggling with every movement. I called but got no response. As it stumbled and caught its balance a terror whipped through me. It moved slowly, a cold dead look in its eyes, lips peeled back to reveal pink, dry gums tipped with coffee-brown teeth.
The only human trait was its shape. Everything else was wretchedly primal, animalistic. The cold stare, jagged movement; the hellish, guttural growls spewed from its throat. I sensed its hunger and I had no idea what to do. When it snarled and stretched its one good arm in an imposing manner, my face's colour drained, took refuge elsewhere, somewhere this monster couldn't slurp it up. Warning lights inside my head flashed on and off accompanied by a whooping siren.
'ALERT, ALERT', they said. 'DANGER ZONE'
If I hadn't been so eager to show off in front of Susan, my bravado would have hidden on the back seat of my mental bus whilst my ability to 'get the fuck away from scary things' revved the engine and slammed the pedal to the proverbial metal.
The man-thing wasn't quick, but it moved with a determined, if shambolic, gait.
"Do you have any weapons?" I asked a petrified Stuart. I tapped him on the head to get his attention. Some security guard he was. In this situation I wanted a gung-ho ex-military type, the kind to bring their own specially crafted side-arm to work though they're not supposed to. Instead I got a quivering wreck, a damsel in distress who couldn't string two words together if his life depended on it. Which it did.
"There! Cupboard! Armoury!" Susan yelled, waggling a finger at appropriately labelled wooden doors, showing off her comprehension skills in the face of an encroaching nightmare. She had one arm across Stuart's chest, stopping him from spinning himself dizzy.
The word 'Armoury' stiffened my resolve and set my brain fizzing with possibilities. It was such a promising word. I hoped for a crossbow just to hear that satisfying THUNK of an arrow leaving the...the bendy wooden bit. Whatever that was.
The slow-moving leprosy victim posed between me and all the advanced weaponry this company afforded their security personnel. It closed the gap.
I needed a plan.
"Okay, get out. Slow. No sudden movements," I instructed my motley crew. "It's dragging its feet but we still should be careful. Looks like it took your buddy down."
In any other situation I'd have found Stuart's extreme emotional response funny, but his pal had been chewed to death and he clearly didn't know whether to be shocked, angry or upset. A Piña Colada of bitter emotions.
"It's following so we can lure it out of the room so I can get to the cupboard. What's in there anyway?"
I thought directing a question at Stuart might snap him out of his wicked delirium, but he refused to speak. He didn't do much of anything. We made our way out, Susan holding tightly on to my shirt. Stuart did the same. They both shook as I swallowed my fear, fuelled by my de-facto leader/hero status.
It took a minute but the...thing?...the thing bumbled out of the door and stopped, twisting its rancid head, scoping the main room. Sniffing the air. The eyes in its head were useless, rolling this way and that, never focusing on any one object or following the direction dictated by its face.
"What is it?" Stuart murmured. "It killed Brian. I want to know what it is and I want to kill it."
"Looks like one of the managers from t
he third floor. They have the nicest suits," Susan said.
"It looks like a person but it isn't a person. It's dead. Dead but moving. What is it? WHAT THE FUCK IS IT?!"
Before I could stop him, Stuart pulled away and ran at the creature. He grabbed a metal chair from a stack and reared it like a battering ram, slamming it into the thing's face. A stunned silence bounced between us as a chair leg pierced one of the wandering eyes and burst its skull, flicking aside a tuft of hair on the back of its head. My stomach did a back flip and my brain screamed 'See! It WAS a valid fear!'
Red and white ooze spurted out and hit the floor with a wet slop, forever ruining the carpet. It looked like a slab of lasagne but without the structure of the pasta sheets. We watched, stunned, as it fell to the ground. Stuart turned to look at us, the anger in his face morphed to shock, confusion. He almost apologised as he yanked the chair out of the creature's head, wincing at the sickening 'sloop' sound it made. Absolute silence reigned, I heard individual drips of fluid fall from the chair in Stuart's hands.
He placed it down and backed away, staring at the result of his anger-tinged attack. A hole in the downed guy's face put him surely beyond the point of medical help. No band-aid in the world capable of repairing that damage.
A throaty growl from the recently deceased broke the fresh quiet, making its way back to its feet minus an eye. Susan rushed forward blind panic, grabbed Stuart and dragged him away.
"Who is this bloke?! Fucking...Captain Persistent?" I yelled, my inability to form witty one-liners showing up like a seeping rash. I waved my arms about, seizing whatever attention it still possessed.
"Oi! Dead-face! C'mere, big boy!" I yelled, like an antagonistic animal trainer.
Susan pulled her speechless charge to the back of the room, creating a large, safe gap between them and the monster. Stuart kept trying to walk away, following some direction suggested by his hobbled brain. As a security guard in an isolated office with a refreshingly low maniac quotient, I assume the worst he ever dealt with was people thieving supplies or a mildly heated water-cooler argument. He'd probably never so much as clenched a fist, never mind pierced a man's peeper with the leg of a chair.
I pulled left, keeping my eyes on the creature, making enough noise to draw its attention. I made my way to the wide open door of the security room, entered and closed it over, leaving a two inch gap. The thing stayed on my trail, but moving slower than a sedated mule; I was the carrot on a stick it idly followed. I had a few minutes before it caught up with me and solved the door conundrum.
The room itself had taken on an unsettling air; I hadn't known the man the mess outside once was, but I'd seen Brian roaming the halls and nodded the occasional 'hello'. Being in the room with his ransacked corpse felt unpleasant; the familiarity made his uncivilised passing incredibly real compared to whatever happened to Anonymous One-Eyed Willy outside.
Brian occupied the space between me and the cupboard marked Armoury, allowing me to take a long, grim look at his rotting carcass.
He appeared to have been dead for weeks which, though I'm no medical doctor, wasn't the slightest bit normal. I felt certain that when we first reached the room, before the other monster decided to make friends, that he appeared only recently deceased. Circular bite marks tore up the man's neck and left shoulder where his shirt ripped open; some showed swollen marks from teeth, others missed chunks. Lines of disease spread from the wounds like a child's drawing of the sun's rays; infectious, perhaps, especially the splashes of white foam-stuff that flecked the body.
Severe scratches raked down his face along with a deep laceration across his forehead, and his nose was missing entirely. When we first arrived his cuts were still dripping and clean, but they'd dried to gnarled, biscuity scabs. His untouched skin looked gaunt and papery. Once rosy, round cheeks were now sunken and his waist lacked six inches or his normal girth. The pool of blood on the floor had coagulated into a turgid, brown circle, enhancing the smell tenfold; it was nothing but dust when I stepped in it. The nausea bubbling inside me approached apocalyptic levels, threatening to expel my stomach's contents all over the room.
I shook my head in an attempt to clear it and headed to the weapon storage. With the end of my tie over my nose, I skipped lightly over the body, humming to myself to distract from the fact I had actually skipped over a DEAD BODY. Like, a real live DEAD BODY. Well, not live. Whatever.
I turned the stiff key and flinched at a loud, high-pitched scream from outside. Susan? Stuart? No way to tell, but the noise got my act together and hurried me the fuck up.
The cupboard contained a whole lot of nothing useful, dashing my dreams of loading up with bad-ass weaponry and strolling out like a walking machine of death-facilitation. There were batons, of which I grabbed three, plus four stun guns of which I grabbed the lot. No bow of any variety.
I turned too quickly with my acquired loot, in an attempt to get back to help my small posse. I neglected to notice that Brian (very dead ex-Brian, the gnawed-on man who rotted like an old banana) had stood up. His baggy pants had fallen to by his ankles in an unfortunate tribute to classic slapstick; only the elastic of his underpants protected his modesty.
I clattered into the corpse, flattening him but holding my balance. Brian gripped my pant leg in his bony fingers. He moved quickly, much quicker than the other specimen, though he had the same lost look in his eyes.
Startled, I kicked wildly at his head and with one final stomp I put my size nine through Brian's facial features. His jaw crumbled like soft clay, leaving a pile of bone and teeth underneath a lolling, cracked tongue. The grip on my pants hadn't relented. With a scooped baton I wailed on his remains for another ten seconds or so, landing blow after squelching blow before examining the mess. I tarried for several seconds, wide eyed and breathless, until Susan screamed "Joe! I mean, Wes!" which snapped me from the distracted state. I forgot about Brian for the moment and charged out to help, snatching up my underwhelming loot.
Susan and Stuart had backed in to a corner, Stuart admirably pushing Susan behind him for that extra sliver of protection. The thing was around ten foot away and closing in. A winding trail of patchy blood-drips marked its route to the door I'd lured it to, then away again. It must have forgotten me the instant I entered.
"Hey!" I shouted. "Hey you, fleshy!"
My noises made the creature pause, skip a step; a confused stumble.
They weren't trapped, per se, but they didn't appear up to running. They looked like they had been stopped in the street by a charity collector with a clipboard, and were too polite to simply walk away whilst he pestered them.
Perhaps their feet were refusing to cooperate, freezing to the floor in a torrent of icy fear. I dropped everything again except three stun guns and my bloodied baton and made my way across the desolate office space, cradling the lot like a delicate baby in my arm. I tossed a gun to Stuart, screaming at him to wake him up from his state of fear-induced paralysis. It slapped him on the chest and fell to the ground as he yelped, surprised by the sudden intrusion in his mental sanctum. Susan's sharp wits prevailed; she caught it on first bounce and pushed it in to Stuart's trembling hand. I landed a heavy blow upside the offender's head and had to hold back a small amount of bile as the dull thud played havoc with my fragile innards. Skull and matted hair sank into a cavity where a brain should have been.
The bone proved as fragile as a tinfoil helmet and the contents seeped out as mush, baby food, from the dent I made. Not the prettiest sight in the world. Not even the prettiest sight in the room.
The worst bit, amongst the mess and the blood, was the creature's ability to carry on nonplussed as if I hadn't made it difficult for it to look good in a beanie hat. It didn't even pause to show the least bit of anger; it turned, arms raised in a sloppy salute. Yes, one of its arms wrongfully pointed skywards and sure, part of its head caved in, but what aspiring, go-getting, rotted death-looking fucker worried about those minor set backs?
'Sure, the batte
ry on my phone has died and yes, I'll need to fill up the car and okay, I suppose the left side of my brain has been reduced to something that looks like a questionable dessert choice at a French restaurant but I'm sure it will be perfectly fine. Now I must eat this man!'
- Portrait of a monster's mind.
Retreating and tossing my second spare stun gun to Susan, I tried to form a plan and found my brain misfiring, muddied with unhelpful questions and semi-compassionate notions. I wanted to slap all of the fuss from my head and concentrate on the important things, like what was this thing and how would I kill it before it killed us? Should I kill it? Is killing an option?
I justified stomping on Brian by playing the self defence card, but felt sure I could walk away from this thing and never see it again.
It moaned with volume but a complete lack of menace; where it felt threatening at first, now it seemed tired, apathetic. The slow, lumbering march sat at odds with the hungry gnashing of teeth. Charged by fear and adrenaline - mostly fear - I decided that killing it was the primo option; remove it from the game for good. But caving in a chunk of its head hadn't affected it at all, so I needed a new approach.
I had to up my game.
I still wrestled with the grievous image of my foot through Brian's jaw but the feeling of 'me or it' helped spur me on a great deal. It held and undeniable threat, basking in the fact it withstood such a high impact injury and lived to groan the tale.
I spun the remaining stun gun in my sweating palm, trying to take solace in my weaponry whilst summing up the situation. It felt light in my hand, a toy, like it didn't deserve the 'weapon' tag.
-
I lost the next two to three minutes to a painful, enduring haze. All I remember is thinking 'fuck it' and rushing the creature, jamming the stun gun into its side and clicking the button with my thumb, then blacking out for an eternity.
-
Coming round, I found Susan leaning over me and Stuart far too close for comfort. After slowly opening my eyes to see him 'puckered up', I jumped up and fell down again. My face felt raw, like someone had slapped my cheeks with hot irons. In fact my whole body felt like that. Tender and tingly at first, quickly surging to what I imagine a roaring BBQ felt like for a strip of marinated pig meat.
I thankfully avoided Stuart planting his lightly-glossed lips on me, which left me with only one concern; namely "WHY DOES MY BODY FEEL LIKE FIRE?"
This is exactly what I screamed at my worry-faced companions, as loud as my cooked throat allowed.
"What the hell happened?" I followed up with, lying on the floor like a starfish.
Susan jammed two fingers into my neck and exuded concern for my well-being, upping the panic meter in my head to batshit status, though the all over pain subsided in sections. I no longer thought I was literally on fire, for instance.
"I'm not dead!" I yelled at her stupid face. "You can tell by my yelling!"
When I sat up Stuart slammed me back down and held me there whilst Susan forced me through a number of silly tests like following her finger with my eyes, and telling her my full name, which seemed too knowingly ironic to be coincidence.
"Joe. I mean, Wes Jetter."
"Don't be sarky. Tell me wh..." she said, before I stopped her.
"Ssh. I want to know what happened. I intended to unleash merry electrical hell upon that thing then I woke up to Stuart's icy blues inches from my face, so would somebody please just tell me what the fuck happened?"
That may seem like an outburst best suited to shouting, but I struggled to strike any manner of volume between the burning gasps. I talked with a mouth full of cinders, full of paprika and jalapeño flakes; the words came out like hushed whispers of a shy ghost. After my initial nine word outburst I suffered scorched lungs and skin that left a trail of smoke when I moved.
"Well Mr. Hero, you decided to hold the stun gun the wrong way and zap your own arm 'til you passed out from the shock. You 'fucked up'."
Stuart's words made me feel three inches tall. He condescended but, probably, rightfully so. I felt like a prized twat. A prized, organically grown, hand picked, class-A twat. With a capital TWA.
"In my defence, I haven't had the training you've obviously undergone. I saved your skin whilst you panicked and quivered in the corner. Yes, quivered. You heard me."
I distilled my words in such a way to make me sound at least a tiny bit heroic.
He decided to fuck me over further, one last turn of the knife.
"Okay, well we'll keep these on us. So for future reference, you point the bit with the metal prongs AT THE OTHER PERSON and THEN press the button. Basically, all the same rules for scissors apply here. Just imagine the other person is a nice big piece of paper with a picture of a kitten on that you want to cut out and stick on your fridge. There's a big white arrow on the side, for if you get lost."
The smarmy cock had me beat there. I looked at the fried device fused to my hand and, with hindsight, couldn't argue.
"...but thank you for trying to help and I'm glad you didn't kill yourself," he added.
"Okay fine, well, you're welcome. Except me, how is everybody? Susan, you okay? How's our friend? I guess his lack of movement, oh, and head, means we won?"
I thought it best for my id, ego and superego if we abandoned the subject of me shocking myself.
"After your unfortunate incident it was pretty much ready to attack you. We both zapped it until it collapsed on top of you – you may have gotten a few extra shocks off the current passing through, sorry - and Stuart kicked it to get it off. We assumed it was down and out after that as little was left of the head, but I grabbed a chair and, well, you know. I'm not proud of it."
Susan's gaze fell to the floor. Stuart pointed to a bent-up chair near the body and mimed a slamming motion. It had received a haphazard red paint job and part of it had snapped off.
"It's okay. You did what you had to do. If you hadn't, well, I might not have gotten up again from my temporary paralysis. At least not in one piece. Thanks."
I dusted myself and we made our way to the security room. I tried to sum up what had happened in my head. Basically, we were attacked by an obvious corpse who had killed Stuart's security friend...who hadn't actually died, because he then attacked me. Unless he had died and had somehow came back to life. Only one word popped into my head, a word I'd dreamt about, a word mainly associated with low budget horror films.
...Zombie.
It sounds better when screamed, like 'ZOOOOMBIIIIIEEEEEE!'
Yeah.
-
Stuart didn't yet know I'd made his deceased buddy even more deceased so I blocked his view before he made it through the doorway.
"There's something you should know..." I said, placing an empathetic hand on his shoulder.
"What? I'm expecting bad news but feel free to surprise me..."
A couplet of apathy and despair gorged each sullen drip from his mouth.
"Okay well, this is hard to explain. Basically, when I came back in to look for a weapon, Brian bit at me as I walked past him. Over him. He grabbed me and did a, well, a biting thing with his teeth."
I mimed it for him, so he knew, before continuing.
"He was dead when we got in here, right? And so was that, that other person, the one we took outside. So he must have been one of them, one of the monsters. Look, I'm so sorry, I am, but he...he wouldn't let go. If these things are what I think they are then we have to hope that there's not an army of them and keep telling ourselves we did what we had to do to get past these two."
For the next few seconds I endured the most painful, awkward silence I'd ever experienced. I felt like the world's worst person.
"Please, say something; I understand if you're pissed off, if you hate me, I really do but..." I trailed off, not knowing what else to say.
"It's fine," he squeaked, not long after.
"Yeah?" I said. I couldn't believe my luck.
"Yes. If...if I hadn't have gone to check on you and wha
t you were up to, I would have been here to help him and he wouldn't have died. I'm not throwing blame, not at you, but I must have left the door open and it got in...I'm guessing he locked the door when it attacked in case there were more, or he thought he could contain it. He's the type to tackle things head on, not run. Oh god it's my fault, if I...I...Oh I don't know."
Stuart fell silent and glanced at his fallen co-worker.
Then he asked me where I'd put Brian and I had nothing to offer beyond a furrowed brow and a 'Huh?' sound. Susan examined a circle of crusted blood and an abandoned pair of pants with a belt still buckled. A few faint prints trailed from the distinct lack of a dead person.
"Wherever he is, he's not in this room. And he has no pants on," she said. "Odds are he's walking around the same as our last playmate so get that door locked, Stu. Wes, check the monitors. Find him. Start with this floor, then work down."
Susan took charge. In fact she grabbed 'charge' by its hair and dragged it across the room. I had one minor issue.
"I put my foot through his fucking head!" I yelled, running to the screens. Stuart winced. "Sorry man, no disrespect, but it was right through his head! How did he get up and walk off after that?"
Susan spoke up: "You missed?"
"I didn't miss! Still got bits of him on my leg."
"Well, I don't know! But he's not here, and if he lunged for you then we know he isn't friendly. He's probably less friendly since you kicked him in the head. I'd be pretty pissed, wouldn't you?"
I agreed.
"...he did actually attack you, didn't he?"
"Yes! He had hold of my leg and did the mouth thing."
I gnashed my teeth like I was eating an invisible corn on the cob.
"That's it?" she said, scolding me with her eyes.
"No, he stood up too. Menacingly!"
"He stood up? For fuck's sake Wes! You don't kill a man for standing up!"
"Menacingly! And, really? Because you killed a man with a chair for walking at you. He might have wanted to give you a big hug but you bashed his brains in!"
"Yes...I suppose. There is a definite threat with them," Susan said calmly, rescinding her verbal attacks now the mirror of accusation pointed at her.
She turned her attention back to Stuart. "I'm sorry, but you have to not think about it until we're out of here and know what's going on. We need you."
Stuart's limp eyebrow lift suggested he agreed, though everything from his down-turned mouth to his slumped body language said otherwise.
"Is there a phone in here?" she asked him. "A computer, internet, anything?"
"Both over there."
He pointed at me, or at least the space behind me, then enquired as to why Brian had taken his pants off. I shrugged the question off, muttered my innocence.
The computer sat there dead to the world, wouldn't turn on despite checking all cords, buttons and switches. Stuart said it might be a fuse thing, but had no idea where the fuses lived. The phone hanging on the wall looked like a relic from the 1970s; I half expected to have to spin the numbers in, but instead endured grimy, worn buttons that were sticky to the touch. I put the receiver to my ear and start prodding the numbers. No dial tone at all, nothing.
"Try pressing zero for reception," he said.
Still nothing.
"Don't think it's connected to anything." I said. "What's that walkie talkie do?"
"Normally I'd use it to contact whoever I was on duty with but, seeing as how he's missing and probably a zombie, plus the fact that his walkie talkie is clipped to his belt with the circuitry hanging from the casing, I don't think I'll bother."
He unclipped it from his belt and stood it on a table.
"Right," Susan said, standing and rolling the sleeves of her shirt/blouse/top/thing up to her elbows, "So we have no way of contacting any other floors?"
"Nope, unless you want to find a window and shout," Stuart said.
"Okay."
Susan acted with determination, mobilising her lacklustre troops and forming a plan for survival. She was as comfortable barking orders as I was taking them; anything to feel productive and take my mind off singed body hair.
Stuart locked the door as Susan and I scoured the security monitors for anything that might give us a better clue as to what was happening elsewhere. We checked the higher floors with no results, skipping past the corpse on our current floor, the one bludgeoned to death minutes earlier.
If we were to make a move, the only way to go was down. I wanted to check the lifts and staircases so we'd know what to expect as we made our way down. After a few minutes of searching we found no other soul. Hardly any cameras pointed into main office areas, they focussed on corridors or small, hidden corners behind filing cabinets. A lot showed water coolers and coffee machines.
No sign at all of undead, pantsless Brian.
"Can we look at the ground floor? I'd like to see normal humans if there are any..."
Susan examined the control panel and flicked a few buttons, trying to bring up my old office, when she accidentally summoned the image of a rotting corpse lying face down at the bottom of some stairs.
At first I thought a person had taken a tumble down the steps, but as the camera zoomed and focussed and we saw details of the scene, it became clear they hadn't been so lucky. Too much blood splashed about; a sign of the frail, soft bodies the zombies suffered. We saw a man, bald, early forties, clawing idly at the floor, trying to swim in the puddle of bodily fluids. The small, cheap CCTV cameras lost or misrepresented all colour by turning everything a dull shade of grey. The flesh on its left leg was missing down to the bone; from the knee to the ankle, completely torn away. The suit pants were ripped but it still wore a sock and shoe on the damaged leg. It appeared to have crawled from the nearby door before coming to a rest, bleeding and rolling around a bit.
Before we said another word, half of the monitors froze, flickered and went dead. Zapped to black, showing me my confused, burnt reflection in the glass; my short hair hilariously frizzed from the shock. A few screens remained, a small bank in the corner of the huge pile. We still saw the snarling, suited monster writhing in its own filth like a pig in muck. Stuart flicked switches and checked wires, trying to bring the rest back to life, but to no avail. Susan shot over to the monitors, mentioning how they all showed different floors of the same staircase before letting out a sharp gasp.
"Oh god."
"What? Another one?" I said, shocked at how comfortable I'd become with it. I sounded bored of them already. Ashamedly but unconvincingly I added "because that'd be awful y'no?"
"No...those two. Two people. I know them, they work in payroll. They work on fifth but they're heading up. They're a floor below that thing! We've got to stop them. It might attack!"
She rushed off toward the door but I got to her before she yanked it open.
"Susan, no. Listen to me, you can't help them. We'll leave when we know where's safe but until then we have to watch the monitors and take our time. Rushing out could mean rushing into a big gang of those things, and that isn't a wise career move for an ambitious secretary, is it?"
"I don't care! We have to warn them..."
"No."
I was stern, forceful, for once in my life. If she went, we all went and honestly, I didn't want to go.
Reluctantly she moved back to the monitors in time to see the payroll duo reach the body...and in time to see it sink teeth into the tall man's wrist as he leant down to check for life.
"Vic!!! No!!!" Susan screamed, slamming her palms together in standard prayer protocol, as we watched him drop to the floor, the flesh torn and colourless blood spraying like a comedy prop.
Mimicking a floundering fish tossed to dry land, the injured man wouldn't keep still, bouncing around the floor and apparently screaming. I saw his mouth snapping as his legs kicked, eerily silent on the monochrome, speaker-less screens.
His friend retreated, a look of terror creeping across his face, towards the door on th
at level. Then he turned and burst through it.
"Thank god, Tim got away. Stu, is there a camera in that room? Seventh floor, off the stairs."
"I can find out. I don't know what's going on with the cameras; they're playing silly-buggers."
"Why are there people on the seventh?" I asked. "I thought that was empty?"
"Nope," Susan told me, "They have project rooms up there, for use as and when. Stuart, come on, I need to see. Make it work."
I never heard of anyone working up there, and I'd never been invited on any secretive 'projects' that hid themselves away either.
"It's not that eas...wait, yes it is. Hang on; I'll see if I can put it on the main screen."
He typed a magical command into a keyboard and brought up the desired room on a slightly bigger monitor left of the ones we'd been staring at. The screen flickered and flushed with static before coming into focus. The angle wasn't helpful and only showed a handful of empty desks and overturned chairs.
"Doesn't look like there're any of those dead zombie things in here," Stuart said, before adding a caveat of "Ohhhh wait..."
Our view switched to another camera aimed at the door and, subsequently, Tim. My jaw dropped so low I thought it'd fallen off.
Tim stood deathly still, his back against the door, his face twisted with a horrified look, as a large group of what we referred to as 'dead zombie things' blocked off every angle. His eyes landed on the camera as it rotated toward him and his face flashed with a brief look of confusion. They inched around yards away, paying him little attention. We saw him lose the battle against his nerves and mouth a scream; every head lifted and craned to look at him. Sets of arms stretched out, clawing at him as he batted them off. He slammed his back against the door, crashing through and forcing it back shut. On the monitor below a re-animated Vic rose slowly to his feet, blood no longer pouring from his wrist wound, looking like he'd been dead for months.
Tim turned and ran into his old friend, sending them both careening to the floor. Tim scrabbled but the horde from the room followed and piled merrily up on top of him. Susan flicked off the power to the monitor.
"Is that real?" Susan asked a confused Stuart. "Or is it a tape? It's a joke tape isn't it? Say it's a joke tape. I'm on one of those terrible prank shows. Tell me I am."
It sounded like a demand.
"It's a live feed, it's all recorded to hard disc drive, stored for a week. Can only get it up again on one of the main computers. That was real, Su."
"Oh."
Stiffening her resolve, Susan's face changed from upset back to steely and determined in the flick of an eyelash. I admired that. She saw two people she knew brutally slaughtered, yet was strong enough to let it go because she had to. Admiration soared her way like a shining, golden eagle.
However, something else clicked in my head. A shining light-bulb burst into existence above me like a beacon of realisation and my mouth spat some words before I could vet them.
"Wait... you're fucking kidding me, aren't you? What were their names again?" I asked, though I knew full well what they were. A smirk formed on my face.
"Tim and Vic, from Payroll. They messed up my wages enough times I got to know them. I had coffee with them, they were best mates," she said, missing my point and giving a fair bit of useless information at the same time.
"What I mean is...they were Tim and Vic. As in Vic and Tim. As in, collectively, VicTim. I'm sorry, yes, tragic and everything, but I'd argue perhaps they asked for it? If my name was Victor I would stay the hell away anybody named Timothy. You'd only have to land in some semi-newsworthy situation and the effect of a thousand pun-loving headline writers jumping for joy could disrupt the Earth's trajectory."
I spoke with my best stand up comic voice as if I was holding a microphone in a ten thousand seater stadium. I wanted to finish it with jazz hands, but figured it tasteless.
Susan looked at me, shook her head and said we should move on, swallowing down anger and repressing it with a drawn sigh. Stuart missed the joke. He remained blank before silently asking me "What?" - acknowledging Susan's temper but not wishing to incur it.
-
Susan piled all weapon-like objects by the door. I pocketed a fresh stun gun and slid a security baton into a belt loop on my pants, disappointed by how flimsy and lightweight they felt. I always thought batons were metal or at least solid wood, but these felt foamy and hollow in the centre. I wouldn't have bothered at all, except I'd used one to cave in a skull.
"Don't you have a toolbox in here, anything like that? A hammer?"
"Nope," Stuart said, "No use for one. Security, not Maintenance."
He busied himself checking the floor below on the camera. "Looks clear where I can see but there's no way of knowing without going. The cameras don't cover half of the whole thing; we don't bother to replace or fix them when they die this high up."
"We should go as prepared as we can. We still don't know where Brian got to," Susan said, shoving a baton into the waistband of her skirt. Tremors ran through her voice as she fought for composure.
We dodged talking about what we thought these things were or where they had come from. I was considering how to bring it up when my train of thought was violently thrown from the tracks by a frantic banging on the locked door - the sound of pounding fists. Stuart jolted away as if he'd been physically struck but we all managed to stay silent, at least at first.
"Help! Security! Please help!"
Susan recognised the voice as Tim's and whispered this information to me, opening her eyes wide and losing the frightened grimace. Strangely, his voice came out higher than I'd expected after seeing him on the screen...but then, having his best mate rise from the dead and take a juicy bite out of his arm must have raised his gonads up a few inches.
Susan raced to the door shouting at him, but Stuart managed to grab her before she got it unlocked.
"He's one of them! We can't let him in!" Stuart reasoned with Susan.
"We saw him grabbed," I added.
"PLEASE! OPEN THE DOOR! I CAN HEAR VOICES!" screamed an obviously petrified Tim, still hammering on the door.
"THEY'RE IN YOUR HEAD, THERE'S NOBODY HERE!" I screamed back in a bid to make him leave. He didn't believe me. To be fair, I didn't present such a strong case. He continued his frenzied knocking.
"PLEASE!"
"NOPE!"
"I'm letting him in."
Susan shrugged Stuart off with surprising ease and I made my way over with a resigned sigh. Stuart joined me in pointing a stun gun intently at the door in case what came shuffling through wasn't the Tim we expected.
"Fine, okay, open it. We've got it covered," I said.
Not being the type make such a mistake twice, I checked the direction the gun pointed; my learning style is trial and one single, painful error. After I encounter that, the first sign of physical trauma, it's smooth sailing from then on. For instance, I learnt that weapons designed to incapacitate criminals fucking hurt and so, looking ahead, I endeavoured to avoid the wrong end of them.
Susan pulled the door open slowly, or at least intended to, until Tim slammed against it and sent her flying half way across the room. I almost stunned him just for that, but the tears in his eyes and wet patch on his unfortunately grey pants made him appear pathetic enough to let off the hook. A spray of blood sullied his shirt and a rip gaped near his shoulder, but he didn't look injured. No oozing wound peeking at me through the torn cotton. He shut the door as Stuart picked Susan up off the floor and I stepped towards our guest, intending to take control of the situation. I dragged a seat from a table and spun it to face the centre of the room.
"Sit. We have questions to ask you. It's Vic, isn't it?"
He shook his head frantically, trying and failing to bring his nerves to a manageable level. "Tim! I'm Tim!"
"Correct answer, ten points," I said, glad he passed my little verification test, "Susan said she recognised you. We saw what happened on the security monitor; we assumed
you were a goner. There was no way we'd get down in time to help."
"Yeah, yeah, I don't actually know what happened. It's all a bit of a blur."
"Tell us what you saw," I said, desperate for a bright interrogation torch to shine in his timid eyes.
He wiped a litre of boiling sweat from his forehead and slumped down into the plastic chair, oblivious to the conspicuous trouser stain. I wasn't planning on mentioning it. "First thing this morning we received this email to head upstairs, sixth floor, but..."
"Email? Who from?" chimed in a confused Stuart, still helping Susan up from her landing site on the floor and brushing her down.
"Erm...I'm not sure. It was a name I didn't recognise. Sorry." said Tim, genuinely apologetic. "We assumed he was someone important because neither of us had been up past the fifth floor. Something to do with one of the projects maybe, Vic thought. When we got there it was all locked off so we went to the seventh in case the email got it wrong or something."
"Did everyone get the email?" I asked, wondering if I was the only one not clued in to the bastard secretive projects. I became intensely annoyed at the company, more so than previously, for never inviting me along on one of these fun expeditions. They probably had catering and everything.
"No, not everyone. I don't think. Claire didn't – Claire sits near me – only Vic and I. We were supposed to show up really early but didn't notice the emails at first. We rushed up the stairs when we saw them. Lifts weren't working for some reason."
Susan, on her feet and dusted off to a presentable standard, summed things up for us like a helpful narrator in a novel or something. "So, Tim, you received an email asking you to come up here, and on your way, those...whatever, attacked you, and Vic didn't survive. How did you escape?"
"How much did you see? I ran. They fell on me, tried to crush me or eat me or something, but I managed to pull out and run up the stairs. Whatever they are, they don't do stairs."
Hehe, 'pull out'.
Susan, thankfully, didn't meet my eyes.
"Doesn't that strike you as odd? Almost planned. Like someone sent you there purposefully. Wes, you mentioned earlier about the 'Vic-Tim' thing...I'm thinking maybe someone knows we're up here and is trying to send us a message."
"That's a pretty fucked up message..." moaned Stuart, who had sat down to cuddle his own knees.
"So...you think there's an evil genius somewhere laughing maniacally and sending stupidly monikered twosomes to their demise to tell us our whereabouts are known?" I said. "Who should we expect next, is there anyone in finance called Mur and Der?"
"It's a possibility. No not about Mur and Der. These two."
She pointed at Tim, who turned away with sad, puppy-dog eyes.
"It's too much of a coincidence, don't you think?"
I nodded a solitary nod that showed I thought Susan had a point but that I wasn't putting much stock in it. I achieved this by raising my eyebrows, placing a thumb and index finger on my chin and down-turning the corners of my mouth whilst nodding once; head tilted for maximum impact. The finger/thumb thing is optional.
I also looked up, sort of at the ceiling, for added effect.