The firefighters, by this point, had enough screwing around.
They remembered their pickaxes had blades.
The shorter one swung at Molly, aiming for her chest. She lifted her forearm to block it, and the blade cut through her metal bracelet. It slipped from her wrist and fell to the floor. The blow had connected with her flesh, though. Molly cried out. Grabbed her wrist. Bent forward.
The taller one took advantage, hurling his pickaxe into Molly’s back, high and to the left. She took a few wobbly steps forward, then dropped.
No one spoke for a few moments. Smoke continued to roil around the building. The air in the conference room itself was beginning to look wavy.
Molly lay with her check pressed against the carpet, staring at Jamie.
He thought about that night a few months ago, that drunken night when he walked her to her car. She had stared at him the same way.
But now something was different.
Now she was pursing her lips.
Blowing him a kiss.
Before her eyes closed.
The shorter firefighter knelt down beside her. Took off his glove. Pressed two stubby fingers to her neck. Shook his head.
“Okay, c’mon,” his partner said. Then he turned to Jamie. “Buddy, you okay?”
“Yeah,” Jamie said, automatically.
But he wasn’t, of course.
“We’ve gotta get out of here. Now.”
“Buddy. You with us?”
Jamie stood up. It all had happened so quickly. Then he remembered what he had been reaching for.
The gun.
Even though the man was dead—his body was right there on the floor, his head covered in a messy halo of blood—his boss’s words echoed.
You think you can just walk away from something like this? You think there aren’t people out there who want to make sure you’re dead? Along with your family?
I’m no killer, Jamie had told David.
But the truth was, he could be.
If it was for his family.
Jamie bent over and took the gun out from under Nichole’s face. The metal was hung up on her skin, and she was still warm. Then again, everything in the room was superheating.
He lunged for Molly’s body. He needed to be sure.
He needed to put a bullet in her brain.
“Hey hey, come on, man,” said shorter firefighter, catching Jamie in his extended arm and holding him back. The firefighter didn’t see he was holding a gun. “She’s gone.”
“Smoke’s getting real bad in here,” his partner said. Jamie could see his eyes and nose beneath the shattered mask. He looked young.
“I have to,” Jamie said.
“No you don’t.”
“She …”
“Buddy, she’s gone. There’s another team behind us. They’ll get her. Along with everybody else.”
Jamie dropped the gun to the carpet.
They all left the building.
OUT OF THE OFFICE
I just want to spend more time with my family.
—POPULAR SAYING
The walk down the south fire tower felt like forever. Jamie had never felt such heat. He was sure he’d passed out at least once. Maybe twice. But he was supported by the arms of the firefighters, whose names he didn’t even know. He thought about asking them, but his mouth couldn’t form the words. He’d have to find out later. Write them. Thank them. Buy them beers. Introduce them to Andrea, Chase. Cook them meals.
The endless repetition of staircase, turn, staircase, turn also felt like it lasted longer than physically possible.
Eventually, though, they reached the ground floor, and Jamie was being placed on a stretcher, and he reached his hand out to thank his rescuers, high-five them, anything, but they were already headed back into the building.
Someone jabbed a needle in his arm and put a mask over his face and rolled him into the back of an ambulance.
He started to drift off, even though it was only the middle of the day. Hard to tell, with the sky outside so black.
He wanted to drift off. Maybe he would snap awake and find himself in his usual position in bed: left arm tucked under Andrea’s pillow. Her hair, fanned across her pillow. Her scent intoxicating, even in the middle of the night. His hand, resting on her hip. Or if the mood was right, up around the front and higher.
So Jamie drifted a bit, fantasizing that he was home already with Andrea. With Chase in the other room, monitor on, so that the moment he fussed, even a little, they’d hear it, and they could be in there to comfort him in a flash.
He could smell her hair.
Or imagine he could.
Wait.
No.
He couldn’t drift off, not yet.
He had to reach Andrea, tell her he was okay. A phone call, something. News of the fire was probably all over TV. God, she could probably see the smoke from the front steps of their apartment building. She’d wonder. Check the news. Hear about 1919. Panic. He couldn’t do that to her.
Jamie sat up on the stretcher. Pulled the mask from his face. Yanked the needle from his arm.
He reached around to his back pocket to see if he’d put his wallet back there, or left it upstairs. Maybe he could hail a cab, be home in seconds.
Instead he found a card.
And on the front was the cartoon of a duck in little boy pants.
Later, investigators clearing out the floors would discover something odd on the thirty-sixth floor: a badly burned single parachute harness-container containing a Dacron parachute. The brand name was consistent with harnesses and parachutes used for BASE jumping. The pack was found on the floor, but it appeared to have been stuffed over the drop-ceiling tiles on the thirty-sixth floor, just outside the office of Murphy, Knox, CEO David Murphy. As the tiles had burned away, the pack dropped to the ground.
Investigators were at a loss to explain the gear, other than an office thrill-seeker stashing the equipment for a future jump.
But that didn’t explain the typewritten note, found inside an envelope deep within the pack:
CONGRATS, it read.
The body of Paul Lewis was discovered that afternoon, when police officers arrived at the Lewis home to inform him that his wife was missing. They were surprised to find him dead, with half-chewed pieces of potato salad in his mouth.
Blood screens came back negative; the death was ruled accidental.
Somebody tipped off a reporter. By the end of the week, over forty-seven newspapers were running the short wire story of one couple’s freakishly bad luck.
Names withheld to protect the innocent.
Jamie raced up Twentieth Street, hunting for a pay phone. He seemed to remember one at the corner of Arch Street, near a diner that had recently gone upscale—charging nine dollars for hamburgers and adding seven martinis to the menu.
He glanced back. The top of 1919 was a raging inferno now, with so much smoke pouring from the top, it looked as if all of Center City were on fire. That it all had been sold to the Devil.
Everybody had been so busy, no one noticed that he had just stepped out of the ambulance and started walking.
Toward home.
There was a phone on Arch Street, just as he’d remembered it. The steel line connecting the handset to the box looked badly damaged, but there was still a dial tone. Jamie punched in his calling card number, then his home phone. Three rings, then the machine picked up.
Hi, you’ve reached us. If you’re calling, you know who we are. Leave a message, and one of us will get back to you. If we feel like it.
Jamie, being funny.
Beep.
“Honey, it’s me, if you’re there pick up. I don’t know if you saw the news, but I’m fine, I’m out of the building, so you don’t have to worry. Are you there?”
Nothing.
“Sweetie, if you’re there, please pick up.”
No Andrea.
“Okay … I’m walking home right now. I’ll be there in five minute
s. I love you.”
Jamie paused another few seconds, just in case. Their apartment was oddly shaped: hallway, kitchen, living room, and office on one floor, then a semi-subterranean floor with two bedrooms and a small space connecting the two. Andrea could easily be downstairs, changing Chase’s diaper. It happened enough.
But usually she picks up by now….
Forget that. Hang up, walk home, hug your wife and kid. Start to tell her the story you’ll probably be telling her the rest of your lives.
Then tell her—in as serious a voice as you can muster—that you think it’s time you quit your job.
Andrea would crack up at that.
Wouldn’t she?
You think you can just walk away from something like this? You think there aren’t people out there who want to make sure you’re dead? Along with your family?
Stop it.
Jamie quickened his pace, blasting by the Franklin Institute, then the main branch of the Free Library, then Starbucks, then the old Granary Building and Spring Garden and the long-closed bodega and then finally the dry cleaners, which told him he had reached Green Street. The path from Market to Green was a gradual uphill. Most days that Jamie walked home from work, he ended up a sweaty mess.
Today, none of that mattered. Not the humidity. The sun. The fire. None of it.
Jamie reached the front door and remembered: his keys.
Damn it! His keys. In his bag, back on the thirty-sixth floor.
Jamie hammered the button next to his name. Please, Andrea, hear the buzzer and answer. Let me hear that click. Your voice on this cheap-ass plastic brown box. Jamie pressed the button again.
Nothing.
He couldn’t stand this.
He pressed other buttons. His neighbors, whom he hardly knew. It wasn’t exactly a social building. Having a kid didn’t make them very popular, either.
C’mon, somebody answer. Give me a click.
C’mon.
Forget it. Jamie walked back down the front stairs, found a large stone in a square of dirt next to a tree, then walked back up and hurled it through the glass. He reached in, unlocked the door, and proceeded back to his apartment. He’d pay the damage. He’d pay it gladly. Smile as he wrote the check.
Their apartment was down the hall, toward the back. He was about to apply the same technique—kick in it, pay for the damages later—but saw it was already ajar.
Andrea never, ever left it open.
She was afraid of Philadelphia.
I’m going to make sure they rape your wife nice and good! They’ll skin your son alive! Right in front of her!
He rushed down the hall past the kitchen into the living room where the TV was on, and it was local news, covering the fire with helicopters and reporters on the street, asking inane questions about what had happened, but Jamie didn’t care about that. He wanted to see Andrea and Chase now. He hurled himself down the creaky wooden stairs that led to their bedrooms.
It was dark down there, which wasn’t unusual. Andrea kept the lights low while Chase napped.
“Andrea!” Jamie shouted.
He heard something coming from the baby’s room.
A small cry.
A tiny little wah.
Oh, thank Christ.
Jamie rounded the bend and looked into Chase’s room. Andrea was there in the wooden rocking chair, holding Chase in her arms, humming to him. Only Andrea looked different. She was only wearing underwear.
“Andrea?”
The room was dark. He needed to see them. Touch them. Smell them.
His hand found the light switch. But before he could flip it, she spoke.
“You didn’t tell me he looks just like you.”
Jamie turned on the lights.
And he screamed.
Acknowledgments
The creator of Severance Package would like to single out the following staff members for exemplary service:
Executive Officers: Meredith, Parker, and Sarah Swierczynski, Allan Guthrie, Marc Resnick, David Hale Smith, Angela Cheng Caplan, Danny Baror, and Shauyi Tai.
Corporate Benefactors: Matthew Baldacci, Bob Berkel, Julie Gutin, Sarah Lumnah, Lauren Manzella, Andrew Martin, Matthew Sharp, Eliani Torres, Tomm Coker, Dennis Calero, and the entire team at St. Martin’s Minotaur.
Silent Partners: Axel Alonso, Ray Banks, Lou Boxer, Ed Brubaker, Ken Bruen, Aldo Calcagno, Jon Cavalier, Nick Childs, Michael Connelly, Bill Crider, Paul Curci, Albin Dixon, Father Luke Elijah, Loren Feldman, Ron Geraci, Greg Gillespie, Maggie Griffin, Paul Guyot, Ethan Iverson, Jon and Ruth Jordan, Jennifer Jordan, McKenna Jordan, Deen Kogan, Terrill Lee Lankford, Joe R. Lansdale, Paul Leyden, Laura Lippman, Michelle Monaghan, H. Keith Melton, Karin Montin, Edward Pettit, Tom Piccirilli, Will Rokos, Greg Rucka, Warren Simons, Kevin Burton Smith, Mark Stanton, David Thompson, Andra Tracy, Peter Weller, Dave White, and all my friends and family.
About the Author
DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI is the author of The Blonde (St. Martin’s Minotaur) and the writer for the Monthly Marvel Comics series Cable. Until recently he was the editor-in-chief of the Philadelphia City Paper, and almost never wanted to kill his employees.
Visit him at www.duaneswierczynski.com.
Table of Contents
WAKE-UP CALL
ARRIVALS
MEETING
AFTER THE MEETING
THE MORNING GRIND
ONE-ON-ONE
MIDMORNING BREAK (WITH PEPPERIDGE FARM COOKIES)
BACK TO WORK
EARLY LUNCH
CLEANUP
CLOSING TIME
OUT OF THE OFFICE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Severance Package Page 21
