by Welker, Wick
“Well, I don't know if the buses are still going or the subway, but they probably are. Does everyone have a ride home? Dave and I are driving together and we can take someone with us.” As he talked, he made his way to the windows of the building and looked down into the streets. He saw swarms of people walking on the sidewalks. Traffic was at a complete halt and he dreaded the thought of waiting in traffic for hours to get home. “Looks like we're going to have a lot of traffic to deal with down there.” He flipped open his phone and called Ellen. The only answer was a loud obtrusive beeping on the line, which then hung up.
The five remaining employees collected their briefcases and purses, and walked past the empty receptionist desk. Keith looked up at the TV and saw an emergency broadcast streaming over the screen. He chose to ignore the thoughts that started to climb into his consciousness and began to think about seeing his wife and daughter. He remembered his busted up front door that he had to fix this weekend and the gasoline stains on his driveway that he promised Ellen he was going to scrub.
His mind was harrowed up in the menial tasks of his daily life when he opened the door to the stairway and now gazed at the menacing face of his nightmares. He didn't see the real life nightmares of terminal cancer, death of a child, divorce or lawsuits. He saw the actual nightmares of his sleeping dreams at night that twisted with the sickening horror of sweaty panic and demented surrealism that made a man leap from his pillow. He saw faces of disease and death climbing the staircase towards him and smelled their stench of sweet rotting meat. For the first time, he knew what panic in a man's heart felt like and the awful sense of being trapped with no defense, no strategy and no hope. He felt the entire height of nine floors below him and imagined every physical way that he could descend them without using the stairs.
He stared down the flight of stairs before him and saw the unmistakable sickness, which had claimed Janice. The stairs were crowded with men and woman, walking limply, and weakly grasping the rails to climb up. They were just starting to approach the staircase that led up to the ninth floor. Some of their faces had been imploded with a crater of pus while others had maintained a better semblance of their faces but suffered in other aspects of their bodies. Some of their arms were bloated with blisters and dripping blood. One woman was crawling up the stairs with one arm clutching the rail while her other arm, missing a hand, was being used to support her weight as she climbed. Her scalp and hair had slid downward off her skull and were hanging precariously from the side of her head. As a collective group, they gushed bodily discharge and blood onto the concrete stairs as they slowly moved like slugs, constantly secreting mucous as they inch along the sidewalk. With their slow movements, they wouldn't have seemed so menacing to Keith if it weren’t for what he had already experienced with his former boss.
The small group of employees behind Keith stared in silent horror and waited for a few more moments to register what they were seeing before panic set into their minds. Before anyone could audibly scream, Keith pushed them backwards and slammed the door to the stairway shut. A loud clap erupted in his ears, silencing and almost removing the image of what was behind the door completely from his memory.
Keith wiped the corners of his mouth with his hand and started to breathe heavily. He looked at Dave and spoke to everyone. “We have to find another way out of here right now. They're all sick, just like Janice. They're sick and dangerous and we can't go that way.”
The red haired receptionist started to breathe erratically and dropped her handbag on the floor, spilling its contents. She ran to the elevators and started to push the up and down buttons like a child first discovering the elevator.
“No, no, we can't use the elevators! It's too dangerous. What if they're broken?” Keith stumbled slowly back into the main work floor of the offices. “Let's get to the other stairwell and hope it’s clear.”
The group clamored together and swiftly made their way across the work floor. No one said a word as they moved. They could see the exit sign around the corner to the other stairwell. They could also see the exit doors as they slammed open while several infected people stumbled inward, toppling over one another. They saw the stairwell crammed with the sick, forcing their way through the doorframe, coughing and hacking at infection in their throats. They would have streamed onto the work floor more quickly but they were falling over one another, creating a dam of human bodies preventing the entry of more people. The florescent lighting of the office made their faces shine with moisture.
The employees stopped, frozen in movement and thought. They knew it was panic time. So they panicked.
The redhead kicked off her high heels and ran into a nearby office slamming the door behind her. The accountant and internist ran after her, ripped the door open and disappeared into the room. Keith's mind flashed forward to an imaginary near future of the five of them trapped in a tiny room trying to ward off an innumerable concourse of walking disease with no food or help for at least the next twenty-four hours. The biological response that flickers within a person when faced with bodily destruction was coursing its way into his pumping heart and electrifying his nerves. The instinct flowing in his bones and muscles told him to run, to run and forget about everyone else. He momentarily cringed at what his nerves were saying to his muscles. Keith looked at Dave, then they mutually began to run the opposite direction right back towards the stairwell that they first tried to descend. They approached it and could see that the sick people on that end hadn't managed to get the door open. Stopping to look back, they could see dozens of infected people slowly trickling into the room. They stumbled over one another and fell, hitting themselves on desks and chairs.
Keith feared it would be only minutes before they started to flood the room like a single drop of red dye infiltrating a bowl of water, slowly but effectively diffusing through the entire room. “This is the only way down. Maybe we can squeeze between them. They might not attack us if we don't bother them.”
“Did you see Janice in there? She attacked you on sight! That staircase is full of them! It's not happening. Let’s just keep moving upward. We can make it to another floor and wait it out. I'm sure there are riot police everywhere taking care of these crazy sons of bitches.” Dave was panting heavily. “We can…” He bent over to put his head between his knees. “I don’t think I can handle this, man. I’m losing it.”
“Just stop panicking. I’ve got an idea.” Keith walked over to a large glass coffee table, grabbed two legs between his forearms and chest, and lifted it up. “We might need this to get them back.” Keith looked at Dave, his hair now free from the confines of hair gel, swinging loosely above his eyes giving him an adolescent appearance. “Are you ready? Let's just knock them down first and then haul our asses up the stairs.”
“Just don’t, I can’t move or something!” Dave fell to his knees and started gasping for air in a panic attack. “I can’t…”
Keith turned to the door and kicked it open, which surprisingly shot outwards. It appeared that the sick weren't crowding the doorway but were beginning to snake their way up to the next set of stairs. As soon as they heard the door, they swiveled their heads over to Keith at the doorframe and accordingly turned their bodies toward him. He stood clutching the legs of the coffee table and looked up the stairs to the next level only feeling hopelessness as he saw the distorted faces moving towards him. It was then, looking forward at the rails that led to the stairs below, in the spiraling chaos of actual human beings inching towards him to bite his flesh and pummel his body that he knew what to do. He instantaneously realized that it is only in moments of panic that risk is rational and insanity is only relative.
“Dave, we have to go down. I have an idea, so follow me.” This was an order.
Keith braced himself with the coffee table and lunged himself at the crowd. They bobbed backwards, stumbling back down the stairs and piling at the platform below. Keith kicked outward and lunged again with the table. More of them fell backward, slammin
g their arms and heads on the rails, losing teeth and tearing sagging flesh as they rolled downward. The table started to crack with each lunge forward that he gave to the crowd.
“No, no what're you doing?” Dave looked up from his kneeling position. “We’ve got to go up!”
Once Keith created a few feet of space around the threshold of the door, he finally threw the table at the crowd, which mainly fell on top of one of their heads, shattering into large shards of glass. An audible thunk echoed up the stairwell. The man's head that it landed on was completely crushed under the blow of the table and Keith could see fragments of bright pink flesh and white skull beneath the glass. He never knew what a live brain looked like and before that moment, didn't think he would ever know. Without hesitation, Keith leaped on top of the fragments of glass slabs and bodies. It felt like he was trying to maneuver through piles of garbage at a junkyard. He stepped squarely on the back of a frail woman who was draped along the steps of the staircase and he kept his feet close together as if he was on a surfboard.
“Come on; this is going to work. Come on!” He grabbed onto the side rails that ran in the middle of the staircase and jumped over them, falling down to the next set of stairs below. He was now on the staircase leading down to the floor below and had landed directly on someone's shoulders, knocking them to the floor. His blow created a domino effect of slamming infected bodies on top of each other, creating a cascade of people chaotically falling down flights of stairs. The sick were dazed and slowly reacting to Keith who was perched on top of them. Keith yelled to Dave from below, “Dave, come on!”
Keith knew momentum was the only way he could make it down the rest of the stairs without the sick regaining their footing and crowding inward on him, suffocating him slowly with the multiplied mass of dozens of bodies. He quickly grabbed onto the rail again and vaulted over it, landing on top of the heads of the sick on the staircase below. It gave him the ridiculous sensation of crowd surfing at a concert. Looking down, he saw that his left shoe had caved in the skull of woman. Shocked, he slowly took his foot out, as if trying to recuperate the loss of the woman’s head. His dress shoes now dripped with the organic matter of the insides of a human head. He realized he only had the choice of ignoring the fact that he was literally disassembling body parts or he was going to be torn apart. With no more time to awe at the macabre of his situation, he leaped down to the next level and could see he was now on the seventh level of the building. His slacks were deeply stained with blood and the whiteness of his shirt was now totally absent.
He continued jumping downward with nothing on his mind but the intense focus of making it to the ground level. He saw the morbid faces of fellow New Yorkers, staring vaguely, coughing loudly, groaning quietly and quickly losing their humanity. His body ached under the humidity of the crowded stairwell. It wasn't moisture from the weather but from the sheer body mass occupying the small space, creating its own microenvironment of heat and pressure. His forehead dripped sweat into his eyes as he leaped downward from one staircase to the next. He could feel tension aching into his arms and knees every time he landed on the people below him.
He looked up and saw the sign for the fourth level. He was doing it. He was riding his way out of the building on the heads of the people that he had greeted just that morning on the streets, at the newsstands and lunch. Each level was as full of infected people as the level before. He couldn't think about what the street looked like, about how many must be out there, if there was this many in here. He couldn't think about how he was going to get out of the city. All he could think about was a big letter “L” for Lobby.
Level two. He was gasping for air. His mind was constantly alluding to being at a rock concert and he briefly mused at the absurdity of it. He kept slipping in between them as he jumped down. Some of them he didn't knock down when he landed and he had to push them over each other, down the stairs. He hit a blonde woman in her already herniated left eye with his fist. She toppled backwards, clutching the arm of another sick person next to her, bringing him down.
He finally jumped to the ground level, walking on the backs of the people he had knocked over. He knew the lobby would be a death trap, full of the horde. He looked behind him and saw a hallway empty of the sick, leading to a dead end underneath the stairs. Seeing the sick regaining their footing and taking notice of him, they began to crowd into him. Some from above noticed the action from below and began to stumble downwards. Keith put his foot on the belly of a man and kicked outward, pushing him into the impending crowd. He had no choice but to move toward the dead end hall watching them sluggishly step towards him in a chaotic yet concerted effort.
He had forgot about Dave who had disappeared, and could only think about how the choice he made in the last ten minutes was going to end his life in a way that would have been impossible for him to conceive. He punched and kicked as they approached, shuffling backwards under the staircase. He now dreamed of being imprisoned upstairs in an office with the other employees. At least, he could have a door between him and these people who had lost the essential characteristics that make them people. The awfulness of being mobbed and torn apart under the dark staircase was starting to consume all of his thoughts. He had no flashes of his life and no thoughts of his loved ones, only a hollow vacuum of anticipated horror. He was finally forced to lean up against the dead end wall and decidedly stare at the floor as the mass pushed towards him, just a few feet away. He thought of the cold cinder block wall behind him and pushed his hands backwards to feel it, to feel something to remind him of reality. Instead of feeling the gritty texture of cinder block, his fingers wrapped around a cold metal bar and sirens immediately blared in his ears.
He had opened the emergency exit doors and he felt a cool breeze grace his sweaty back from the crack in the door. In the moment of panic, he had completely forgotten about emergency exit doors.
In a burst of radiant hope, he slammed his back at the door and fell out towards a completely empty alleyway. The natural sunlight flooded his eyes as he fell to the ground with the sick crowd clutching immediately after him from the doorway. Watching them as they started falling on top of him, he leapt to his feet and sprinted towards the street, his feet squishing in his shoes from the soaking mess of body parts that he came from. His entire body was coated in infected moisture from the stairwell. He had no time to think about cleaning or worry about getting infected. He already gotten so much in his mouth and eyes, he felt like it was pointless to even try. Then he stopped and thought about Dave. He looked back, seeing people streaming from the doorway, flopping over each other and he could only hope that Dave stayed behind with the others and not gotten swallowed up in the crowd.
As he ran, he only saw cars on the street from his view in the alley. There were no crowds or mobs of infected people trying to swarm him. Just a few people running with a coordinated stride that suggested that they weren’t yet sick. When he made it out to the street, he realized why half of it was empty and the other half looked like a street concert. The entrance of the building had three rows of riot police blocking the street, staving off an immense crowd of the sick. The police were equipped with large plastic shields, rubber ball rifles and gas masks. They were methodically firing non-lethal weapons and gas canisters at the crowd, subduing the advances of the mob. The riot police had prevented the alley he was in from getting flooded with the sick. He could see the front doors of his office building, facing the street, completely crowded with the sick. If he had gone through the lobby of the building, he would’ve been torn apart, he thought. Down the other end of the street people were fleeing into buildings, hiding in stores or running to the underground subways. The riot police were the only things stopping a massive flooding of the sick throughout all the city blocks behind him.
The sun was sinking behind buildings, slanting its light through the narrow slits among the skyscrapers of the city and bouncing off windows. Keith could see the entire block behind the police flooded with wr
ithing bodies and taxicabs. The infected people walked with obscene irregularity. Each gait of their steps was different from the one before. They shuffled, fell on one another and writhed on the pavement while other bodies piled on top. By sheer force of the sick, a bus had been turned on its side. They piled up beside it, climbing upward, creating a heap of human body mass until the bus was overturned into a newsstand. They soon swarmed around and on top of the bus until it was merely a rectangular shape of moving bodies. It was as if the entire portion behind the police had become a writhing swarm of maggots infiltrating every portion of a carcass, crowding orifices and burrowing into skin.
They had broken every street assessable window and were stumbling into shops and apartment buildings. Keith could hear a constant flow of screams and cries for help coming from the mob; people trapped amongst the sick, crowded and swamped by hair and limbs. He heard a cry from above and saw a woman at a window ledge on the third story of a building. The sick were behind her within the room where they had stranded her to the ledge of the building. An arm clutched from within, knocking her from the window. He watched her fall into a mass of bodies below, greatly breaking her fall. She attempted to get to her feet but her struggle had drawn the attention of the sick that enclosed her in a capsule of wavering bodies. They wildly swung their arms at her. One was kneeling on her torso and it started to bring down his mouth as hard as he could on her face. One policeman saw the struggle and fired a gas canister at the crowd around the woman, enveloping the scene in a veil of white fog. Keith could see more people fall from windows from the same predicament as the woman.
He had to run, flee and forget. He turned from the horrors of the scene to escape the living nightmare that was unfolding in front of the office building that he had worked at for ten years. He ducked down into a stairway leading to a subway beneath, but he knew he had no idea if the trains were running. However, it was either a train or his own two feet that were going to get him out of the city.
