Lisa Unger - Smoke

She came up behind the New Day building and crossed the yard quickly, edging the bushes on the perimeter and cutting across where the distance from the bushes to the building was shortest. She saw a door without handles and hoped it was the same door she’d opened for Jeffrey. She couldn’t be sure, she felt turned around and disoriented. She put her fingers between the frame and the door and tried to pull, but it was stuck fast. She couldn’t budge it. Either someone had found the tape and locked the door, or it was too heavy for her small fingertips-or it was the wrong door.

She moved along the wall looking for another door in the same general area, feeling along the masonry. She was sure now, seeing the front of the building, that the door she was at was the right one. She went back and tried it again. She couldn’t move it. She felt her heart start to race as she realized she wasn’t going to be able to get back into the building. That Jeff was in there alone, thinking she was in there, too. She looked around for something to try to pry into the space between the frame and the door but there was nothing except some large rocks and a few thin branches.

Jeffrey picked the lock on an inside door and slipped into a room just as he heard the elevator doors slide open behind him. Leaning against the wall, he listened to the sound of feet approaching. But whoever it was passed by the door, their shadows flashing on the thin white strip of light that came in under the door. Then there was silence.

When he could breathe again, he looked around to find himself in what looked like a security nerve center. The lights were dim and the room was cool. There was a wall of locked glass cabinets housing rows of computer servers. He walked around the wall and came to an alcove containing twenty closed-circuit monitors in five rows of four. An empty seat that was still warm and a half-consumed bottle of water told him he wouldn’t be alone for long.

Images of long empty hallways lined with closed doors, elevator banks, wide shots of the building’s exterior, the auditorium where Trevor Rhames was doing his preaching, flashed in intervals on the black-and-white screens. As he watched he saw Lydia being escorted from the building by a blonde woman and two big men. He watched until she was off camera. He knew she’d try to come back through the door they’d left open and that he’d have to hurry if he was going to meet her there.

He sat at the computer monitor beside the security screens and moved the mouse. The dark screen came to life and a menu of options popped up in front of him. He clicked on the file that said “Camera Views” and found a list of subcategories. “Hallways and Exterior Views” was already highlighted. He chose a folder named “Interior Rooms” and the images on the screens changed.

He let out a long breath. “Oh my God,” he said, just as he heard the shutters begin to come down and the alarms start to sound. Then the knob to the door started to turn.

The night erupted with the thunderous sound of moving metal. Lydia took an unconscious step back and brought her hand to her chest. The security shutters were coming down over the doors and windows. Dax had been wrong. There was a security shutter over the door to the kitchen. She fought a rising tide of panic as she looked around on the ground and found a large rock. She pried it from the earth and raced to the door. She placed the rock at the base, holding it there, hoping to keep the door from coming down all the way.

When the door hit the rock it made a terrible grinding sound and stopped, moved halfway back up then came to a final crunching halt, as if the rock had knocked it off its track. She sighed with relief. Jeffrey could still get out, if he would leave believing she was still inside. The lawn flooded with light then and Lydia was exposed.

She heard the sound of footsteps and voices and saw two large forms turn the corner. They stood for a second, looking in her direction. The way the floods were shining, she could only make them out as tall and menacing shadows. One of them pointed. And then they both began running toward her.

Lydia ran. She peered behind her once and caught the impression of bald heads and leather. She thought of the man they’d seen last night and the one who had followed her from her grandmother’s apartment. She felt the icy cold finger of fear on her spine, though her heart was a steam engine, working hard and burning hot. She could hear them gaining on her. They were bigger, had longer legs. There was no way she could outrun them.

Then the Land Rover was pulling in front of her and coming to a squealing stop. The door flew open.

“What the fuck happened? Where’s Jeff?” yelled Dax, starting to drive before she’d closed the door.

“He’s still in there,” she said, breathless, slamming the door. “Loop around. We have to go back.”

Dax gunned the engine and the Rover launched forward. Lydia looked behind to see the two men who’d been chasing her come to a stop in the middle of the street. Dax turned a corner fast and the rubber squealed against the concrete.

“I knocked one of the security doors off its track,” she said, still trying to catch her breath. “The door to the kitchen where he came in… he can still get out that way.”

“I thought…”

“Your guy was wrong or he lied. There was a security door.”

Dax issued a string of expletives that embarrassed even Lydia, who swore like a truck driver without even thinking about it most of the time.

“What do we do?” asked Lydia.

“They won’t expect us to come back,” he said. “I’m going to make a long loop and then we’ll come back around.”

He started talking then about what they would do next, how she shouldn’t worry and how Jeffrey could take care of himself. But she wasn’t listening. All she could hear was a ringing in her ears and the pounding of her heart. She looked at the brown building as they approached again from the opposite direction. It was locked down like a fortress. All she could think was, Jeffrey’s in there. I left him in there .

Some memories don’t fade with time and distance. Some grow more vivid, while the people, events, and places around them, just before or just after, become faint and vague. Like colorized black-and-white films, they remain eerily bright, something just off about them, something that glows. They take on a special cast and over time become mythic in their scope and impact.

Lydia met Jeffrey Mark on the worst day of her life. She was fifteen years old and she had just discovered the murdered body of her mother. She’d sat rigid on the front stoop of her home, unable to respond to the people who tried to help her. She had gotten the idea in her mind that if she didn’t speak, if she sat very still on the stoop and didn’t react to the horror she had just witnessed, that she would wake up to discover she was dreaming. She clung to this idea. It made sense to her.

Lydia remembered sitting on the stoop with a female police officer who had tried her best to console her and to convince her to go inside the house, but Lydia would not move. She could remember clearly the scent of the woman’s shampoo, the feel of her hand on her arm. But her words were just a soothing mumble that Lydia couldn’t understand. She sat there for hours, stone-faced and shivering, while police officers walked to and from the house.

It was sitting on that stoop that she first saw Jeffrey. He pulled up with another man in a black car. She saw him looking at her as the sedan came to a stop, gravel crunching under its wheels. He walked toward her, his eyes on her the whole time. He looked strong and important to her, like someone who would have rescued her mother if he could have. He knelt before her and asked the female officer to leave.