SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

THUMP, THUMP.

Henry and Nate simultaneously met eyes. “A fire,” Henry said, and began to move toward the door.

“Where’s the extinguisher?” Nate asked.

“By the door,” Henry said. “Raj, you come with us. Lisa,” he said, quickly scanning the other women, “you stay down here.”

“A fire?” Iona asked.

“A flash fire,” Nate said. “Probably happened when they opened the door, blew out the wall.”

“Listen,” Raj said.

The men froze.

“It’s stopped,” he added.

“That may be a good thing,” Nate said, and continued out of the lounge.

Then, without warning, came the screams. Nate had heard many screams, too many to count. He only counted the firsts. Horrid pleas, heinous situations, but these were different. These were a first.

Then the shrieks shifted to the conference room and Nate spun back to see who was breaking down. Deidra had her hand flat against the side of her head. Lisa and Iona were already on her, trying to calm her down. Whether the cavalry came in five minutes or five hours, Deidra was never going to be the same.

Raj’s jaw was agape.

“Let’s go,” Nate said.

Henry was already near the door, freeing the huge red canister from the fire bay. He handed Raj the axe. To his right Nate saw the huge guillotine paper cutter the Marketeers used to cut mailings and material. He levered up the two-foot blade, put his right shoe on the wooden base, and with a heave, pried it free. Then he turned to join the other two men at the stairwell door.

He squeezed his grip onto the handle of his new machete-like blade. Henry gave him a slight nod. It hadn’t occurred to Nate until then that he was destroying company property, but in the moment, they were beyond such norms, and beyond was a place Nate was comfortable with.

They were met with a hanging mist of white creamy haze.

“There’s no smell to this smoke,” Raj said as the made their way up the stairwell.

“This isn’t smoke. It’s the vapor coming down from somewhere,” Henry said. “Try not to breath it in, there’s a fire door up above.”

“Right,” Raj said. “Will there be a blaze on the other side?”

“Most likely not,” Nate said. “The sprinklers should’ve done their job.”

“Without power?”

“They don’t need power. They work off heat.”

Henry stopped outside of the door, one hand hovering in front of it, and the other holding the extinguisher.

“So if the fire’s out,” Raj said, “why do we need all of this?”

“Pockets,” Nate said. “The sprinklers can’t reach everywhere.”

“The door is cool,” Henry said. He slipped his free hand down to the handle. “That’s cool too.”

“Does that mean we can go in?” Raj asked.

Henry peered past Raj to Nate. Nate shrugged.

Henry reached and began to turn the handle.

“The screaming’s stopped,” Raj said.

Henry glanced at Raj and then proceeded to open the door.

“What the…” Raj said. His arms went limp beside him, the axe hung low. The raw odor of feces and the rancid mix of other inner body juices overwhelmed Raj and he lurched forward to empty his stomach. Since there was nothing there, he merely gagged hard, and then gagged again.

Neither Nate nor Henry said anything. Henry let the extinguisher fall to the floor. There hadn’t been a fire. Nothing was burned. The place was in disarray, but there wasn’t the slightest sign of char. Nate could see that the far wall was different than the floor below. The glass wasn’t shattered. The walls on this level were receded. A wrap-around sky-high patio was the ceiling to the conference room below. The double doors to the patio were slid wide open to the cream fog outside, and between them, a section of the cafeteria.

There were no signs of Rob or Bruce. No Terry in her little black dress.

No signs except for the thinly spread, shining layer of blood and intestinal tract that was pasted across the floor, the walls, the plants, and the scattered remnants of broken chairs and tables. The section of room outside the stairwell door could’ve been the inside of a mammoth food processor left on too long. Nate had seen people blown apart, vaporized; this was not that. This was a bludgeoning. This was something ground up, chewed up, and spit back out.

Small chunks of reddish brown flesh—parts of the body Nate couldn’t readily identify—plopped from the ceiling to the floor and landed with the squish of freshly chopped meat.

Raj, hands on his knees, was taking deep breaths. Nate was breathing through his mouth.

“What do you think…?” Henry began to ask.

“I dunno,” Nate said. “An explosion of some kind.” He took a step back. “I’ve never seen a concussion that could—”

“Why did the screams come afterward?” Raj asked. Nate and Henry both looked at the back of the man’s head, still bent forward.

The question was a legitimate one. Why did the screams come afterward? Nate thought to himself. He gazed out toward the void of the fog. The mist, a wall of white still near the outside of the conference room window below, began to creep across the patio. Nate gave Raj’s upper arm a jab with his elbow. Again, the three said nothing. They stared at the blanket of mist slowly moving toward them, eagerly covering the floor as it went. It was through the doors and halfway across the cafeteria before they saw them, the willowy bright wriggling three-foot-long tips of the tentacle arms. One, then three, and then seven, spread across the width of the foot-high rolling fog, twirling and feeling their way forward, forward…

“We have to go,” Nate said, and he reached for the handle behind him. With the same grip, he spun himself around, pushed the door open, and pulled himself into the stairwell. Raj and Henry were stuck to his back in their retreat and, rather than burst down the stairs, pushed their weight against the door to ensure it was secure.

And then the three descended the misting stairwell.

“We have to get out of this building,” Nate said, squeezing his new two-foot heavy steel with a greater purpose than the trip up.

“Let’s get the others and go,” Henry said.

Nate didn’t bother to ask the other two what they thought they saw, and they didn’t ask him. Raj, he figured, was most likely in a state of shock, and Henry and he weren’t going to dwell on something they couldn’t explain. Things don’t come out of the fog, and if they do, they don’t come out of the sky on the eighty-sixth floor.

Having been the first back into the stairwell Nate was the first to the Titan floor door. He pulled the handle open without hesitation, took two steps in, and froze. He felt the wood of Raj’s axe handle press into his back as Raj ran into him, taken by the same shock.

The door Nate opened didn’t open to the eighty-fifth floor, not to the Marketing department, or the conference room on the other side, or to the waiting Iona, Deidra, or Lisa. The door opened to the blood-stained cafeteria and the cluster of tentacles meticulously inspecting the center of the room.

“This can’t be,” Raj said.

Nate pushed him back and then pivoted to get through the door. “Go, go, go.”

They scurried down the misty stairs again, this time Henry leading the way, and when they reached the next flight, he peeked in and gave the other two a reassuring nod before fully opening the door.

Why did the screams come afterward? Nate thought again. Now it made sense, except it didn’t make sense. They—Rob and Terry and Bruce—had probably run to escape the cafeteria and had landed back into the trap. It made sense but it didn’t make sense.

This time they weren’t on the floor of the cafeteria, but they weren’t on the eighty-fifth floor either. The glass walls were sloped up to the open floor above and to the floor below, three flights combined, their levels intermingled.