Линвуд Баркли - Elevator Pitch

That had never happened before.

“What the fuck?” Jeremy said to Amad.

Amad said, “Maybe there was a fire drill and everyone’s outside.”

“There was no fire alarm, dipshit,” Jeremy said.

After twenty minutes, they started to get worried.

Jeremy suggested they open the escape hatch on the top of the car. If they could get into it, and hit the elevator buttons, they could probably get out. But the hatch did not lift off. It was bolted on, and they had not exactly brought along a tool kit.

They did not want to get caught on top of the car. They’d be in trouble not just with the building management, but their parents. All the other times they’d elevator-surfed, they’d gotten away with it.

But at the half-hour mark, they started shouting.

“Help!” they cried together. “Help us! We’re in here! Somebody get us out!”

No one heard them.

Connie Boyle’s phone buzzed.

It was screen side down on her desk at an investment firm in one of the uppermost floors of One World Trade Center, the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere, sixth tallest in the world. Although technically 104 stories tall, there were only ninety-four actual stories, and when Connie chose to look out the window, which was not often, she felt overwhelmed by the view.

And not in a good way.

It had taken Connie, forty-three, a long time to get used to the idea of working up here in the clouds. First of all, she was uncomfortable with heights. It wasn’t a totally crippling fear, but it was bad enough that she had insisted, when her firm moved here, on a work station well inside the building, away from the windows. She could go entire weeks without ever looking outside. Her friends would say to her, “Wow, how cool to work up there! Do you ever get tired of that view?”

“What view?” she often replied.

Connie’s anxiety about working here was not due solely to her uneasiness with heights. One World Trade Center had been erected on the site of the old World Trade Center. Connie could never get over the fear that the new building was a target. Whenever she heard a passing jet she felt a wave of anxiety. She felt relief at the end of every day, when she put her feet back down on Fulton Street.

Her phone buzzed, and she saw that it was her husband. When he asked her in a panicked tone — before she’d even had a chance to say hello — whether she was okay, her heart began to race and she almost instantly began to feel faint and dizzy.

“Why?” she asked.

“The elevators,” he said. “Have they shut down your elevators?”

She had no idea what he was talking about, but before she could ask him what he knew that she did not, a woman’s voice came over the building’s public address system.

“May I have your attention, please,” she said.

Connie’s dizziness intensified. Her heart was a jackhammer.

“Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.”

“It’s going to be okay,” her husband said. “I just wanted to be sure you were—”

Connie was half listening to her husband, half listening to the voice emanating from the speakers.

“They’re shutting down the elevators,” she whispered. “We... we can’t use the elevators. We’re... Oh God, we’re stuck up here. We’re sitting ducks.”

She dropped the phone onto her desk as she stood up out of her chair. She looked over the partitions to the north window.

“We’re trapped,” she said. Her voice grew louder, and shakier. “We have to get out of here! We have to get out!”

Several coworkers leapt from their chairs and gathered around Connie, attempting to console her. But the woman was in the throes of a full-scale panic attack.

“Connie, Connie, it’s okay,” said one woman. “It’s just a precaution. Yeah, we’ve got a long walk down the stairs to get home but—”

But Connie didn’t hear her. She had passed out and collapsed on the floor.

Retired librarian Zachary Carrick went to Zabar’s Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Zachary bought only as much as he could carry. Like many New Yorkers, he did not drive. Unlike most New Yorkers, he did not like to take taxis, and hated the subway. If Zachary was going to go someplace, it had to be within walking distance. Which meant that Zachary pretty much never left the Upper West Side. His world these days had become limited to roughly a nine-square block area. Zabar’s was only around the corner, at Broadway and Eightieth. He liked to walk, but he didn’t like to walk far.

So Zachary would buy what he needed for two days. On Fridays, he would buy a little extra, to get him through to Monday. It wasn’t just that Zachary Carrick only purchased what he could carry. He figured, at the age of eighty-seven, he didn’t want to buy too much food if there was a chance he might not get the opportunity to consume it. This worried him most on Fridays. Suppose, he often thought to himself, I pop my clog Friday night, and I’ve gone and bought enough provisions to get me through the entire weekend? What a waste of money that would be.

Zachary had been on his own since his wife, Glenda, passed away nearly twenty years ago, but he had never left their eighteenth-floor apartment on West Eighty-First. Why move? The place wasn’t huge to begin with. Why mess with a perfectly good routine?

Although he’d spent a career surrounded by newspapers and periodicals filled with current events, Zachary didn’t give a rat’s ass about what went on anymore. He didn’t get any papers and almost never turned on his TV, unless it was to watch what he called the Lobby Channel, where he could see who was coming in and out of the building. Out of the hundreds of channels available to him, this was, without question, the best reality show on TV.

Zachary was not prepared for what awaited him upon his return to the building today.

There were Out of Order signs taped to all three elevators.

A dozen other residents were milling about in the lobby, grousing about the inconvenience. Most of them were, as Zachary himself might say, getting on. A few of them were even as old as he was. One of them was Mrs. Attick, who was in a wheelchair. She looked the most distressed of any of them.

“What the hell is going on?” he asked, setting down his two Zabar’s bags. Even though they weren’t that heavy, his arms felt like they were going to pop out of their sockets. The other residents quickly brought him up to speed.

“It was Headley gave the order!” one man said. “Shut ’em all down! All over the city!”

“That son of a bitch,” Zachary said. “How the hell am I supposed to get upstairs? I can’t walk up to eighteen. I’ll be dead before I get to ten.”

Mrs. Attick said, “What about Griffin?”

“Who?”

“My cat. The super said there’s no way to know how long this is going to go on. Could be hours or it could be days! Who’s going to feed Griffin?”

Zachary hated cats and didn’t much care what happened to Mrs. Attick’s. He just wanted to get back up to his apartment, where he could watch what was happening here on his TV while he made himself some coffee.

“My daughter came and took me to lunch,” Mrs. Attick said in her high-pitched voice. “But she dropped me off without knowing what had happened! She would have gone up and fed Griffin. She works out four days a week. She could have run up those stairs like it was nothing. Griffin’s going to be worried sick.”

Zachary was more worried about his yogurt. He needed to get it into the refrigerator.

He was about to go hunting for the super when the main doors flew open and in came two male paramedics — one short, one tall — with a wheeled gurney. They looked frustrated, but not shocked, when they saw the Out of Order signs.