by Diane Cook
I thought about how I might fare here alone. I looked through the lattice of the window gate at the smoke from the many fires that licked the sky. As the sun fell for the night, it glowed a sickly purple, like it had an awful flu and was giving up.
I could maybe last a week or two. If they noticed that my husband no longer patrolled the street, they might investigate the apartment, find me here, and have a field day. I looked at my son. I wondered if he would fuss at having to say good-bye. How would he remember me? I’d be that funny woman who used to ride on his shoulders. He might remember the feel of me there, almost weightless in light of his strength. But what more could he remember? That I taught him crunches? Gave him all my fortitude? Even though he looked like a man at times, he was just a baby still. It was strange to know, looking at them, that they would make it and be fine. And stranger to know that they looked at me and knew I would not. And that we would go anyway.
My husband unfolded maps at the table. He traced routes with his giant fingertip.
“We have to cross the mountains. The people there are wild,” he warned, his tone defeated.
But I felt buoyed by the idea. Mountains are beautiful. It must be springtime, I thought, and maybe there would be flowers. Maybe we would dip in a mountain lake, blue like my boy’s eyes, cold enough to pucker my skin. We might hear birds calling rather than people hollering. If we went for a hike, were we as likely to be set upon as we were when we left this building? I found it hard to believe that anything could be as brutal as our neighbors.
I remembered seeing pictures of people living in the bottoms of large trees. They were old pictures, even back in my childhood, but surely it was still done. I’d seen whole cars being driven through big hollowed trunks as a stunt. “Maybe we could live in a tree,” I dreamed.
My husband said angrily, “Don’t be a fool. The mountains are dangerous. They’re not like the cities. The city is still civilized.”
I laughed, even though he’d said it straight-faced.
I took his damaged hands in mine. With his arms slack and heavy, I could barely lift them to my lips. In another time, I thought, I wouldn’t have given him a second glance walking down the street. He’s outlandish, his body triangular. But maybe he was a good man, and I wondered, under different circumstances or given more time, if he might surprise me. We might surprise each other. And isn’t that really what makes for a nice life with someone?
“You told a joke,” I said proudly.
He said sadly, “Ha.”
We made love that night, and it was almost tender. Like he felt bad and wanted to remember me in some soft-lit way. So I pulled at his hair and I scratched away the bandages on his hands, bit open the scabs until they bled. His eyes watered, but he took it. I was trying to show him. Don’t give up on me yet.
Finally, he batted me away like a pest. My eye swelled shut, a tinny ring expanded in my ear. He turned from me and sulked.
With my good eye I looked toward my son’s room, where he slept, peaceful and trusting. I had made it this far. I slipped quietly from the bed. I could be brutal too, even in the safety of our once fine home.
IT’S COMING
The alarm goes off smack in the middle of the presentation. We try to look at each other in the darkened office, in the dim glow of PowerPoint colors; we scoff, we are stunned. Someone says, “This is a drill, right?” We look to the head of the table, where our boss usually sits, but he is not here today; another meeting, another city. Of course Roger usurps our missing boss’s authority. “Yes,” he says in a deeper than natural voice, “just a drill, people,” and we are forced to continue absorbing the presentation.
But soon we’re whispering under the drone of the presenter. Someone says, “I mean, what are the odds it chose our building, right?” Someone replies, “Well, it is the tallest.” Someone counters, “No, it’s not.” There is some whispering back and forth on this point.
At the other end of the table, someone hisses, “I always thought it would come at night, while we slept.”
“Yeah,” someone agrees, “what could be more terrible than taking out a whole subdivision of vulnerable sleeping families?”
“I know! I feel so much safer when I come through these doors in the morning.”
“Yes, it must be a drill.” Suddenly these two are holding hands and trembling.
The presenter finally stops the PowerPoint because someone is crying loudly, “It’s not a drill, it’s not a drill,” and we all kind of know the crier is right.
Then we’re moving quickly, snapping, This is it, people. We remind one another of protocol as we gather our belongings. Be professional. Focus. Just grab the essentials. You won’t care about your stupid umbrella when it’s got you by the legs. Executive chairs swirl as we pull sweaters, purses, suit coats, from their backs and pour from the boardroom.
The emergency exit is just squeezing shut; the whole floor has already evacuated, the last of them leaving an overwhelming whiff of some childish perfume. We hear the thudding stampede down the cement stairs, and we are about to follow, fling that emergency door wide again, when we hear panicked screams coming from far down the stairwell. The screams become terrible, wet and pulpy, and the stampede of feet reverses back up the stairs, though it sounds greatly diminished.
We run away from the door and pass a conference room where new hires have been ensconced in a training meeting. They huddle under the long oval table. They don’t know the office emergency protocol yet. It’s on page 140 of their manual, and there’s no way they got that far this morning. Thompson, who had been leading the meeting, is quaking under the head of the table. No doubt he hadn’t thoroughly prepped for the training session and hadn’t reread protocol; he’s a winger, not a preparer, which is sometimes advantageous and other times unfortunate. Currently, it is unfortunate; the conference room has been left leaderless. We shrug as we run by, as if to say Oops and Good luck and Don’t follow us.
Past the conference room, we whisper Parachutes extra quietly so the new hires won’t hear. We run to our windowed offices, where our emergency parachutes are locked in safes. They’re a secret executive perk. But the parachutes are gone. The only people who knew about them were the secretaries who ordered them, ordered the safes, hid them, and told us our combinations. It appears they have also taken them. And there they go. The glossy white canopies float past our windows, our secretaries’ skirts blown up over their faces. And we thought they could be trusted.
Now we want to panic, but we calmly huddle instead. What now? we ask ourselves. “This way,” someone yells, pointing to the other hallway. We run.
At the end of the hallway we have two options: go right, down the hall that leads to the break room; go left, down the hall to where the bathrooms are. With so many of us we are funneling and tight and someone yells “Split up!” and that seems smart, so we split and some of us go to the break room and some of us go to the bathroom.
In front of the men’s and women’s we hesitate; we are a mix of men and women. Should we continue to split, or break company policy and enter a bathroom that does not correspond to our sex? No one does that, not even during holiday parties when drunk. It is one of the very followed rules. But if we split, we worry we’d feel vulnerable. If it brutalized the women who hid alone in the women’s, we’d feel horrible. We’d feel equally bad if it brutalized the men in the men’s. It would be much better if everyone had stayed together and gone to the left; there would be a larger number of men and women and we wouldn’t have to be so worried.
But in the break room there are problems, too. Too many of us went right. We yelled, This is too many! as we squeezed down the hall, but no one wanted to be the one to turn the other way, cross that open vulnerable T-space again; what if it was bounding down right at that very moment and caught us in its grotesque arms? In the break room we cram in, jostle for positions away from the door, but there are only so many of those positions, and some of us can’t even get in the room and we’
re left squirming in the doorway. We admit our mistake because it is always best to. This won’t work! we scream.
Meanwhile, outside the restrooms someone is yelling, “It won’t think to look in the women’s.” Why? Who knows, but we all agree with the logic and tumble in.
We can’t believe how nice the women’s bathroom is. It smells good; it is so clean. We huddle close, away from the door, pushing into the handicap stall. In bursts the break room crew, insisting it wouldn’t work. It’s good to be together again. Until Gloria starts whisper-whining that she wished she’d stayed in the break room so she could eat her lunch. “I brought leftover noodles. I was looking forward to them.” We listen, but we can’t imagine how she can feel hungry at a time like this. Then she gets weepy. “They were from my date last night. It went really well. You know how hard it’s been for me.” We know. We nod. “I really liked him. I was going to think about him while I ate the noodles.” She bawls. A few of us succeed in shushing her into a light simper. We think about Gloria’s date, what he might have looked like, what kind of noodles they’d been, if the date had gone as well as she claims, because Gloria is known to embellish. We think about our own lunches and why they don’t contain something through which to experience one last joy, if in fact we’ve reached our end. We think about our loved ones, if we have any. We press in close. We listen for it.
Stan is right next to Susan, his eyes fixed on the floor, jimmying his hand in his pocket. Quickly we realize that he can see up Susan’s skirt in the high polish of the marble floors, can see her soft thigh meet her floral panties, and that he is incrementally stiffening; Susan realizes it too.
Stan senses a heightening of the already heightened stillness of the lavatory and understands he’s been discovered. He looks up sheepishly, his jiggling slows; he removes his hand from his pocket and blushes behind his large glasses.
We’re about to groan, Stan, as in, That’s really unprofessional, but Susan looks around at us, like she has had one of our industry’s sought-after aha moments, and then she grabs Stan’s hand and pushes it up her skirt, and after the briefest surprised pause he finger-fucks her right there in front of us until her thighs glisten and we have to cover her mouth so her orgasm won’t give us away. Of course, she bites us wildly, leaves our fingers hurt and wet. And Stan, wearing the most tremendous grin, his glasses all askew, conjures a pulsing, rounded erection that eventually gives way beneath his soft twill pants, darkening a spot like drool on a pillowcase, just from bringing Susan to climax in the women’s bathroom on what might very well be the last day of our lives. We watch with acute envy, but we can’t exactly do it ourselves, now can we?
As Susan collapses into Stan’s arms, panting and mewing, we hear the muffled sounds of limbs snapping, bodies being cleaved, each hiccupping death caw; the new hires have been found. “Let’s roll,” someone says, and we abandon the bathroom.
Layered bodies block the emergency exit stairwell. Bloodied viscera slides under the door into the hall from the conference room. Inside it sounds like forty tigers wrestling. We have to think. We know what our best move is, but we don’t want to admit it. We exchange looks; the burdened looks of having to make the tough decisions. They are familiar to us; we are executives. We are about to say, Our only way out is up, when we hear a man and woman giggling from just left of the center of our huddle.
Stan has yanked Susan’s blouse open, the buttons splaying from the torn threads. Her large purple nipple creases between his fingertips. And she’s started up her moaning again. Come on, you guys, we hiss, as in, That’s really unprofessional. But there they are. Now Stan’s shoes are off and his pants down, and he has surprisingly hard ropy legs atop which sits his marshmallow torso. Susan fondles his bobbing prick; it seems to nod yes. She is all the way nude, and her breasts fall much lower than we noticed before; they are not just big, which we’d known, but heavy, and her stomach protrudes enough that they seem to rest on it. And it isn’t that it isn’t attractive; it is just, again, surprising. And we marvel at how bodies never look naked the way they look in clothes. When will we learn? we chide ourselves, and wish we’d spent more time admiring one another, our loved ones, ourselves.
From the conference room it sounds like forty alligators wrestling in a swamp, and tides of blood pulse out from under the door.
Stan and Susan clatter to the floor, their limbs jutting and tied together; our huddle is greatly disturbed.
“Leave them,” someone shouts. And we run.
Because this is our building, we know there is a short stairwell that continues above the regular stairwell—the one filled with bodies—beyond the Do Not Enter door. It has an unfinished quality, though it is safe. If anyone takes anyone anywhere during a holiday party, it is probably here, and it is probably low-level clerks, lonely new hires, our deceitful secretaries; they fumble past forgotten panels of drywall and unused rods of pipe to find a railing to get bent over, a wall to leverage against.
We clamber and slip over the flayed bodies blocking the door; the inside of their skin is slick, and sheets of their raw, violet muscle seem to spasm. We hope it is a trick of the wavering light. All the way down the stairwell is a thick corpse wall. Just as we’d expected. There would be no way to push through so many mangled parts of former employees.
Up we go.
Flickering work spotlights dangle here and there, smelling like the overtired motors of electronics; the stairwell is treacherous in a pall of brown light. We grope our way along the walls and rails. Up higher, lights blaze everywhere, and we have to shield our eyes. Workmen must have abandoned some project at the first sound of the alarms. Perhaps their bodies are part of the corpse wall.
And here we are.
We hear, “Wait,” and below appear Stan and Susan. They trail naked, and we can hear it bounding close behind them. Stan’s scared little prick flops between his legs and Susan’s breasts clap together with each panicked stride. They are holding hands, fingers entwined and intimate, like they’ve spent a lifetime strolling along, holding one another. And that’s real terror we see in their eyes, because they aren’t concerned just for their own survival but for each other’s. Their feet are bloodied, and they struggle, slip, tug each other along, they try to kiss and hug, and they cry and cry.
It follows their scent.
And oh, we can’t tell you what we see next, it’s just too horrible. And sad. But it buys us some time to get out to the roof.
When we heave the roof door we scatter a thousand pigeons who thought they’d found a good hiding spot. Think again, pigeons. We stack roof debris in front of the door to slow its advance.
The alarm wails over the whole city. From the roof edge we see people flooding into the streets, down the streets and onto the wide boulevards, along the boulevards and then out to the multilane highways, where vehicles stall in the scrum and drivers abandon them to join the swift-footed exodus; they spiral around exchanges that spill out to the state highways until those highways narrow into county roads through small towns and then vein into neighborhood lanes and dissolve into fields of hay; all those people fan out across that dead autumn yellow until they reach the woods, and then we can track their movement by the quivering of the treetops as the millions jostle those poor trunks and trammel the forest floor. It is like a great green rolling swell that will deliver them to the actual ocean’s edge, and we wonder what will happen then. Will they wade out in confusion? Or will they buck momentum, backpedal, scatter throughout the forests and mountains, decide speciously that they have a natural aptitude for survival-by-hiding-spot? We would have loved to know; and we could have: it’s a tall building, some say the tallest, and from here we can see everything. But just then the alarm quiets; the city has emptied save for us. And we notice a rhythmic rumbling under our shined shoes. It is finished with Stan and Susan, and it’s coming for us.
We vow to one another not to let it get us alive; that we won’t cower in fear and be taken; we fought this long. We will ju
mp when it forces the roof door open. We will jump together on the count of three. We are executives, dammit, and this is our building, our company. The carnage in the hallways and stairwells is our carnage; those were our employees.
We stand wind-shocked at the building lip. The sun shrinks behind grim clouds. “I will look it right in the eye,” someone resolves weepily. We grit our teeth.
The door cracks ever so slightly, slowly, as though it relishes these final moments. Our protective stack of garbage tumbles. “Remember, on three,” someone chokes.
Then Roger says, “Wait. Here’s an idea.” He steps off the ledge and faces us. “Imagine.” He holds his hands out like he’s positioning a portrait; a portrait of his idea.
We’re trembling. We’re wetting ourselves. But we’re listening.
“Ask yourselves this: Does it really want to kill us?”
Harsh orange light from the stairwell seeps into the gray sky as the door opens more. It seems to be there, just behind shadow, gathering itself.
Did you see the stairwell?
The new hires are just fluid now.
Roger puts a hand up to quiet us. “I know, I know. But we’re top tier. Up here.” He plateaus a hand above his own head. “We’re executives.”
So were Stan and Susan.
Roger shakes his head. “They lost focus. They lacked leadership. Now look at them,” he says. “Trust me. We’ve got something it can use. We’re golden.” Then he humbly scrunches his shoulders as if to say, But what do I know? which is pure Roger, because he can clearly hear the murmur of dissent he has sparked. He rocks back and forth on his wing tips, smiling. Roger loves mixing it up.
Someone starts the count.
“One.”
We clasp hands. Some of us squeeze our eyes shut.
“Wait, let’s think about what Roger said,” a voice pleads.
It’s quiet up here on the roof above a city with no people. The only sounds now are its harsh breath behind the splitting door; the creaking of city buildings that, lightened of their human loads, now sway easily in the wind; and Roger, whistling.
