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

“Where are we?” Nate asked. “This can’t be the eighty-fourth floor.”

“No,” Henry said. “A hundred and first. We’re on the observation level.”

“No escape,” Raj said.

“What’s that?” Nate asked.

“We’re in Naraka.”

“Naraka?”

“Naraka is Hindi, it’s like the western purgatory, or hell. There is no escape. Our souls were sent here to make amends for our sins.”

“You don’t seriously believe in that?” Nate asked.

“Look.” Raj gestured over the railing to the rolling mist on the level below. The mist filled an alcove in a swirl and then dissipated, leaving in its place the blurred figure of a person, of a man or a woman, Nate couldn’t be sure. The near transparent figure appeared to wrestle with its surroundings, as if the air around it was crushing the creature. A muffled faraway scream echoed off the high-sloped glass from no particular direction, and the misting fog enveloped the shadow of a being as both faded to nothing.

“You see?” Raj said. “You don’t have to believe.”

The stairwell was different than the day before, the mist no longer a floating vapor, rather a hanging cloud. They didn’t have to travel far, one floor at a time was suffice to end up anywhere, and it didn’t seem to matter if they ascended or descended because the floor the door opened up to would be the luck of the draw. They went as high as the observation deck and as low as the forty-third, twenty stories at a time, never traveling more than a flight between doors. Nate and Henry were the only ones focused on their search for…well, first for a way out, and then for food, and then just searching. Nate thought he heard some people behind the doors more than once, but the floors were always empty, of people anyway. Of living people.

They didn’t return to the cafeteria, or to the Titan offices on the eighty-fifth floor. They came across the tentacles again though, in other places, and other things, glimmers, things they didn’t stick around to investigate. Some of the floors, where the glass walls had shattered and the mist was fuller, were too unsettling to step through. Objects hung midair, suspended for no reason, not flying, not falling, simply arrested in place—a phone, trash bins, a family photo from someone’s desk hanging in an aisle, the glass punched out of the frame, all floating. And those floors—maybe due to the air, the altitude, or the pressure—were a physical struggle of vertigo and nausea.

Raj was an incessantly chatting shadow. Repeating nonsense about Naraka and purgatory and hell and demons and apologies—Nate tuned him out and moved him along.

They found a jackpot of food on a floor where the word Wonderco was painted in red across a yellow wall by the elevator, a dot-com, Nate figured, because the entire place was painted in festival colors. There were beanbags and air cushions, and a huge pantry with a dry cereal and fruit buffet where huge plastic containers of rainbow-colored Fruity Pebbles, granola, cornflakes, and M&Ms hung in a row, beside bowls of bananas, apples, and oranges. Only a few days old, the fruit was a bounty, as was the refrigerator full of Parmalat. The fridge was out but the small cartons of long life milk didn’t need refrigeration to stay fresh. In the cupboards below, Nate found five plastic wrapped yellow backpacks with the Wonderco logo printed across the top. He pulled them out, tossed them on the counter. The three feasted on the milk and fruit and cornflakes while Henry and Nate stuffed the packs with what food they could carry.

When they were done they rested on the beanbags.

Raj began to snore as soon as his head was down.

“It’s the stress,” Henry said.

“You don’t really think he’s coming back?” Nate asked.

“Oh, no. I just meant that the stress wore on him quickly.”

“And you?”

Henry pursed his lips and Nate couldn’t help but think that rather than spitting out the truth, the man was sizing up an answer to fit the situation. “I think I see what you’re getting at. Who in their right mind wouldn’t be stressed? Stress can’t be avoided, but I don’t think that we, the two of us, are that different in terms of stress.”

Nate scooted down and back into the huge beanbag pillow. He grinned at Henry and then said, “I just wanted to start my new job.”

“I’m sure you did. But that’s what I mean. The stress is a tool, a vehicle to go forward,” Henry glanced at Raj, snorting air in through his nose, “not a place to check out.”

“Checking out isn’t all that bad. I mean, if you can’t go back. He’s never seen anything…” Nate caught himself. He didn’t want to share too much. Not that he saw that as an issue with Henry, he just didn’t want to go there, to that place. “I’ll be glad to get out of here.”

“I agree,” Henry said. “I’m glad we found food. I’ll feel better when we get some to the others, and best when we get out of here.”

Not once in the next week did Nate return to the eighty-fifth floor. He, Henry, and Raj did stumble into the cafeteria on eighty-six three more times, but that was as close as they ever got to returning to the coworkers they’d left behind. When they came across the cafeteria they took what they could carry and moved on; it didn’t matter if it was a ‘blood floor.’ By this time they’d found that there were a lot of blood floors.

More and more the stairwell doors opened to floors that were missing outer walls, entire panes of the thick glass torn from the building’s side. There were more floors where the rules of physics didn’t apply, where objects hung midair, as did the sounds of doors opening, slamming shut, of laughter, and screams, the origins of all unfound. Nate discovered these odd floors—too unsettling to enter in the first days—were good for water, because for whatever reason the faucets in the bathrooms still worked, the toilets still flushed. He became so quickly accustomed to the weird physics that he would set his things next to him in midair without even thinking about it. He’d set his razor on an invisible counter while he shaved, let his paper cutter sword suspend while he went through the drawers of a desk. He became so used to the lack of ‘normal’ that when he was on a normal floor he would forget himself and do the same, only to find his blade or other object let loose and fall to the floor.

They weren’t moving floor to floor as rapidly as they did the first few days. There wasn’t much point in rushing, and not every floor had food. There was a day when every door opened to mirrored sets of cubicles, row upon row of empty workspaces, and nothing else. They spent an entire day without food and water. They almost lost Raj that day, so their habits changed. If they found a floor with a pantry or any food at all, they stayed for a while.

Raj listened and did what he was told, but no longer conversed, merely mumbled to himself, more so when he was upset. Henry was good for conversation, if there was anything to talk about, but there usually wasn’t. There hadn’t been anything new to discuss for days, days delineated by the shades of gray gleam emitting from the shrouding creamy mist.

Hunger wasn’t the greatest risk. There were other things they’d encountered that were far worse. There were the upper floors—that they could walk into from below—with the little bubbles of shifting reality. There was the hive floor. Spooked from a floor, they traversed the stairwell in the dark, opened a door, and were attacked by a swarm, a flock of flying blue eels. Henry, the last off the floor, took the brunt of the attack, his yellow Wonderco shoulder pack was near shredded as he squeezed out the door. Of these though, the tentacle creatures hiding, prowling in the mist were the greater risk of all. Any open windowed floor meant the potential wriggle then lash. And they weren’t all little arms like those they first saw on eighty-six. There were greater creatures out there, creatures with pipes for limbs, creatures that could smash a man to paste and then spread him jam and butter onto every surface of a room. They’d seen the remains on the blood floors and had near encounters more than once. Had seen the long arms probing through the length of a room when they peeked inside. The creatures were a constant danger. Nate, Henry, and Raj moved slowly between floors. They were prey.