Sub-Zero

by Robert W. Walker

  The elevator opened on the concourse level at the second floor. Crocker went directly for the information desk, where he’d find a telephone and call Marie. Before he got to the desk, the sight of the windows and doors leading out to Michigan Avenue almost knocked him over. The concourse windows would soon burst from the weight of snow and ice, reaching God knew how far above the concourse level.

  “My God,” Tim gulped, realizing the FBC building was fast becoming a monolithic tomb for them all. Then he wondered how the blue-faced assassin had gotten inside the building. He looked as though he’d just crawled out of the snow. Crocker forced his mind over every exit and entrance he knew to the building. He knew the doors to the lower level garage had a sign marked emergency exit. He wondered where it led to. Probably right into the alley on Hubbard, below Michigan. There was also the loading dock at that level. The stranger must have somehow come through one of these. There were other exits, but they’d be buried too. Perhaps the only way out of FBC was the way the stranger got in, at the lower Wacker-Michigan level. He’d have to get the blue man talking. He didn’t like the eerie feeling that came over him as he looked into the blank wall of white snow, perhaps twenty-five feet high, which seemed to beckon in some unholy voice, ‘Open the door, open the door.’ He didn’t like the idea of being trapped.

  He turned away from the wall of ice at the windows and dialed Marie by punching 0 on the phone. The phone had a video screen and Tim was anxious to see a human face. The concourse seemed like a place for only dead people.

  But Marie didn’t pick up her phone. It just rang and rang. The other switchboard girls had long before stopped answering calls or bothering with intercom calls throughout the building. They must have finally enticed Marie to join them in the cafeteria, Tim reasoned.

  “Damnit, Marie, where are you when I need you?”

  5

  At the switchboard, located on level twenty-one in a small corner office behind an unmarked door, Tim Crocker knew he would find the Master-com amid the octopuslooking wires of the gigantic switchboard. With a simple flick of a switch, the Master-com could reach all floors, offices and rooms in the building, overriding any other in-house communications. It was designed for such an emergency. Even Joanna and Wertman at ground level would hear him.

  God could not have so large a switchboard in heaven, Tim thought. Each time he entered the room where Marie and fifteen other receptionists worked, he felt trapped and uncomfortable. The room looked smaller that it was, due to the vast console of plugs, wires, mysterious lights, and the little caps that made Tim think of points and plugs in the old gas-burning automobile his father drove.

  The room was unusually cluttered. Chairs seemed to have been knocked over when the girls left in a mad rush from the console to the cafeteria where, as Tim had seen earlier, they’d taken up more permanent residence, some sleeping at tables. Even Marie’s chair was thrown down beside the large blackboard. That seemed strange to Tim.

  As did the lights. They were not completely on or off. If Marie had left for the cafeteria, he reasoned, she’d have first tidied up the room. She would not only have picked up the chairs but pushed them into place. She wouldn’t have left ashtrays and magazines lying about. Nor would she have left the lights on. She was very meticulous, and perhaps the most energy-conscious person Tim had ever met. They’d argued over her pinching light, gas, water, microwaves, and, as if that wasn’t enough, personal power! He’d often accused her of holding back when they made love. She denied it, of course.

  It was as if someone had come in after Marie had left to completely and maliciously disrupt everything. Unless she herself had finally blown her stack like everyone else. Perhaps she’d said to hell with conservation, neatness, and good living. He hoped it was the former. He wouldn’t really like to see Marie change.

  He found the tiny switch on the Master-com and cleared his throat. Then he realized he should put on the headphone to hear himself clearly. “Attention. Attention everyone. We need a doctor or someone familiar with first aid at the lower level, Harold Gordon’s office, right away! We need help with a cold-burn victim. He’s blue with cold.”

  He snapped the switch down and pulled off the headphones, his thick, sandy-brown hair lifting in tufts about his ears. He wondered for a moment about Marie and the room. It looked for all the world as though someone had deliberately stormed the room. The semidarkness made him feel chilled. He decided to return to Wertman and Joanna. He had some questions for the man with the blue face.

  6

  Mark Wertman held the blue-faced killer’s arms pinned against his back. Wertman had never touched a living man who was so stiff and unresponsive before. He knew the would-be killer’s life was fast going, unless he could be helped. But the lower level was not the place to start thawing him out. It was uncannily cold. There seemed to be a terrible draft coming from ahead.

  Joanna clutched Wertman’s arm, uncomfortable with the cold and the dingy surroundings.

  “Gordy? You in there for Chrissake?” asked Wertman as he knocked at the door marked H. G. Gordon, Chief of Building Maintenance and Security.

  “My feet,” complained Joanna, looking at the crack at the bottom of the door. “Do you feel that?”

  Mark felt the rush of super-cooled air coming from beneath the door. “You’d swear the door led to the outside.”

  “He doesn’t answer. Maybe he’s upstairs somewhere, Mark.”

  “There’s always someone on duty.”

  “Not now. I mean, not necessarily, in these circumstances,” Joanna argued. “If someone were down here they’d answer. Wouldn’t they?”

  “Open the door,” he instructed her, still holding the icy stranger.

  Joanna tried to twist the knob but it wouldn’t budge.

  “It’s frozen, Mark. My hands are numb just touching it.”

  Mark looked into the face of the would-be killer. He wondered who he was, what his name could be. “He must have come in through this way, Jo.”

  Suddenly, the nearly frozen man seemed to tip like a lead-bottomed child’s toy. He slipped down, faint. Mark released him. Joanna hovered over the stranger.

  “He’s comatose, I think,” she said, shaking her head in concern.

  Mark was at the door, however, not paying any attention. He held the still cold gun in his hand and pointed it mockingly at the doorknob. “I feel like a detective in a spy novel where all the gadgets have backfired on me, This gun’s no good and there’s no way I can turn this simple, stupid doorknob!”

  He backed up and kicked at the door several times without much effect. Then he tried several more times until he heard some noise from inside. Joanna looked to him. “Sounds like ice on the other side fell away,” he said.

  He tried the knob again. It came grudgingly.

  Inside, Gordy was at his desk asleep, it seemed, over some paperwork, but it was difficult to tell because a wind of gale force rushed out into the corridor, hitting Wertman in the face. One whole wall, the northwest wall, had given way under the ice and snow. Brick and metal had come crashing down. The temperature in the office had to be thirty or forty below. Since the lower level was somewhat protected from the heavy snows by the cave effect of being beneath Wacker and Michigan, Wertman could not believe this was happening to the outside of the building. Gordy’s office, located on the northwest corner, was outside much of the lower Wacker cover, below street level.

  Wertman had never seen a more chilling sight in his life than the large form of Harold Gordon slumped over his desk, the skin on his hands and neck purple in the dingy light of the refrigerated room. It was then he realized Gordy’s head was matted with blood. He’d been hit over the left eye. Blood had coagulated with the frost. It looked as though someone had set off a bomb on that side of the building, and Gordy had been struck by debris and left to die here.

  But wouldn’t a bomb have been heard? Wouldn’t it have quaked the building? Perhaps it had. Perhaps some of the people in the building di
d feel it, but chalked up the shattering effect to the storm itself. Maybe it was the storm that broke down the wall! Wertman’s mind raced. The man who’d tried to kill him must have known Gordy was Wertman’s body guard. He must know about Project WWC. He rushed out the door, closing it against the forceful wind.

  He almost pushed Joanna aside when she tried to ask him what had happened. She’d seen the dead Security Chief and the mound of snow about the office. But Wertman was rifling through the pockets of the man who lay unconscious on the frozen concrete floor of LL.

  Wertman’s large arms yanked the unconscious man over brutally, gashing his forehead. Mark’s face was contorted with hate for the man. Joanna stared, unbelieving. She’d never seen Mark so angry before.

  “Who are you, you son-of-a bitch!” Wertman was screaming at the limp body of the man on the floor.

  “He’s unconscious, Mark! Take it easy, you’ll kill him!” Joanna yelled. “Didn’t you get a good enough look in there?” shouted Mark, pointing to Gordon’s office door.

  Joanna was certain, looking into his fiery, angry gaze that he was going to seize her roughly, perhaps to take her into Harold Gordon’s icebound office for a closer look at the dead man. This must be what the experts on human behavior meant by the “bad-weather animal,” thought Joanna, looking into his face. The phrase referred to the non-person man becomes in the face of extreme weather conditions.

  The bad-weather animal was all that was left in man after the food, water, and warmth were gone. He was the cave-dweller of years past who killed his own children over the carcass of a deer, antelope, or bison. The bad-weather animal was the woman who helped to devour the child killed by the father. To stay alive she might even have done the killing herself. Altruism, parental love, concern for anyone at all was wiped out in a frozen world-men return to survival of the fittest. It was a nightmare Joanna did not want to face. She’d always told herself no matter how horrible the world’s climate became, the human race could never return to its animal beginnings. Civilization would remain civilization.

  On the other hand, as a reporter, she’d seen mounting evidence of cruel, inhuman actions directly or indirectly related to the growing neurosis over the killer storms that continued to devastate the U.S. and other countries.

  Mark’s eyes, looking down at the man who’d undoubtedly killed Harold Gordon and tried to kill Wertman, bespoke murder. Was even a man like Mark capable of being controlled by escalating feelings of anger, the more he was cooped up inside the Fieldcrest Building watching his world fall down around him?

  Wertman had turned back to the prone body of the blue-faced man. He yanked a wallet from his inside coat pocket. His eyes seemed to rise in a look of surprise as he scanned it.

  “Come on,” he said to Joanna, placing the wallet in his own coat pocket. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “But what about him’?” Joanna pointed to the man on the floor.

  “He’s dead, Jo. Come on.”

  She shook her head, unsure. She bent over the body to feel for a pulse. There was none. Mark had already gone down the hall, and was ringing for an elevator when she got there.

  It was then, standing at the elevator doors, waiting for the elevator to descend and open to them, they heard the startling, crackling noise. It was the noise of some gutteral ghost. The voice seemed to be emanating from Gordy’s office. It sounded like a plea for help.

  “What is it?” Joanna shivered.

  Wertman didn’t answer right away. “Intercom. Some one’s on override. It’s broadcasting in Gordy’s office. Must be Crocker.”

  When the elevator doors opened, Joanna was relieved to get off LL. On the elevator, going up, she wondered why flip phrases and outrageous thoughts raced through her mind in times of crisis. She supposed it was an inner defense mechanism. She wondered if anyone else did it. Right now, with Mark Wertman acting like a total stranger, tearing apart the dead man’s wallet, she wanted to say, “Where to from here? Ladies lingerie? Housewares?”

  Instead she pressed 101, the observation deck, the furthest point from LL on the board.

  “I’ve got to get back to the weather room, Jo,” Wertman said almost casually. “Still have my reports to make to the National Weather Service.”

  “Who is he?” she asked, pressing the number 1 00 on the panel.

  “His name was Joraski, Emil Joraski, according to this.”

  They were silent for a moment. Wertman looked at her. His eyes had cooled. “I’ve never heard of him before.”

  “You don’t know if he was really out to get you do you? I mean, he seemed out of his mind. He could have been looking for anyone to kill. He may have been a maniac. Anyone. But you acted like a hunted man, as though you half expected someone to be pointing a gun at you, the way you leaped on him. I’m not so sure you didn’t insure his death, knocking him around like a melon!”

  “Hey, wait a minute, Jo,” began Wertman, raising his large index finger.

  “All right, maybe insure was the wrong word. But the man didn’t need the extra jockeying around you gave him, Mark. Maybe he’d still be alive to talk, if you’ hadn’t added the element of fright to his condition.”

  “He was dead when he hit the floor down there, Jot Don’t make a damned ass of yourself on top of everything else today.”

  “And another thing,” she countered, largely ignoring his remark. “Stop calling me Jo! I hate being called Jo.”

  Mark’s full, boyish grin suddenly lit up his face. The elevator had ascended to the weather room. “Okay, okay,” he was laughing.

  “I’m staying with you, Mark,” she said, getting off the elevator ahead of him. “At least for a while.”

  He nodded in understanding. “But I’ll be busy for a couple of hours here.”

  “While you’re doing that, I’ll report Gordon’s and Joraski’s deaths to the police,” she said.

  “Don’t bother. I’ll take care of that. Nothing the police can do anyway right now,” he said. “They’re as snowbound as we are.”

  “But we should make the report,” she answered.

  “1 will. Now, you go into my office, fix yourself a drink, and get some sleep. Use the hotbox, if you like.”

  7

  On the elevator, going up, Joanna Sommers wondered why flip phrases and outrageous thoughts raced through her mind in times of crisis. She supposed it was an inner defense mechanism. She wondered if anyone else did it. Right now, with Mark Wertman acting like a total stranger, tearing apart the dead man’s wallet, she wanted to say, “Where to from here? Ladies lingerie? Housewares?”

  Instead she pressed 101, the observation deck, the furthest point from LL on the board.

  “I’ve got to get back to the weather room, Jo,” Wertman said almost casually. “Still have my reports to make to the National Weather Service.”

  “Who is he?” she asked, pressing the number 100 on the panel.

  “His name was Joraski, Emil Joraski, according to this.”

  They were silent for a moment. Wertman looked at her. His eyes had cooled. “I’ve never heard of him before.”

  “You don’t know if he was really out to get you do you?

  I mean, he seemed out of his mind. He could have been looking for anyone to kill. He may have been a maniac.

  8

  The hill of bristled hair around Tim Crocker’s head, and the tufts of frost embedded in his thick beard, made him appear like an Eskimo in a fur-lined parka, though he was in his shirtsleeves. In his bare hands he held a large chunk of snow-encrusted ice.

  “I’m okay, I’m just fine,” he kept telling the man in the elevator beside him. ‘

  George Walsh, a second-year medical student, was shorter in stature than Tim, and he carried his barrel chest around as if it were armor. His face was older, serious, and Neanderthal. Serious balding had begun at each temple. He reminded Tim of a college friend who spent up to twelve hours a day in the archives, studying Middle and Old English.

  Tim
had gone back to the lower level in search of Joanna, Wertman, Gordy and the would-be killer. He’d found the blue-faced man in the corridor just as Wertman and Joanna had left him, on his stomach, dead. He then investigated Gordy’s office. What he found there struck terror into him. When he opened the door, the force of the wind almost knocked him down. Gordy’s body was solidly frozen. A mound of snow and ice arched from across the room where the wall had caved in, and formed a beautiful ridge over Harold Gordon’s shoulder blades. It was like an old horror film about a giant spider spinning a giant web, trapping people within it. The snow seemed to have been working its way toward old Gordy in a crazy, thinking sort of way, wishing to wrap itself about him, to coddle his dead remains.