Diane Cook - Man V. Nature - Stories

We can’t believe how nice the women’s bathroom is. It smells good; it is so clean. We huddle close, away from the door, pushing into the handicap stall. In bursts the break room crew, insisting it wouldn’t work. It’s good to be together again. Until Gloria starts whisper-whining that she wished she’d stayed in the break room so she could eat her lunch. “I brought leftover noodles. I was looking forward to them.” We listen, but we can’t imagine how she can feel hungry at a time like this. Then she gets weepy. “They were from my date last night. It went really well. You know how hard it’s been for me.” We know. We nod. “I really liked him. I was going to think about him while I ate the noodles.” She bawls. A few of us succeed in shushing her into a light simper. We think about Gloria’s date, what he might have looked like, what kind of noodles they’d been, if the date had gone as well as she claims, because Gloria is known to embellish. We think about our own lunches and why they don’t contain something through which to experience one last joy, if in fact we’ve reached our end. We think about our loved ones, if we have any. We press in close. We listen for it.

Stan is right next to Susan, his eyes fixed on the floor, jimmying his hand in his pocket. Quickly we realize that he can see up Susan’s skirt in the high polish of the marble floors, can see her soft thigh meet her floral panties, and that he is incrementally stiffening; Susan realizes it too.

Stan senses a heightening of the already heightened stillness of the lavatory and understands he’s been discovered. He looks up sheepishly, his jiggling slows; he removes his hand from his pocket and blushes behind his large glasses.

We’re about to groan, Stan , as in, That’s really unprofessional , but Susan looks around at us, like she has had one of our industry’s sought-after aha moments, and then she grabs Stan’s hand and pushes it up her skirt, and after the briefest surprised pause he finger-fucks her right there in front of us until her thighs glisten and we have to cover her mouth so her orgasm won’t give us away. Of course, she bites us wildly, leaves our fingers hurt and wet. And Stan, wearing the most tremendous grin, his glasses all askew, conjures a pulsing, rounded erection that eventually gives way beneath his soft twill pants, darkening a spot like drool on a pillowcase, just from bringing Susan to climax in the women’s bathroom on what might very well be the last day of our lives. We watch with acute envy, but we can’t exactly do it ourselves, now can we?

As Susan collapses into Stan’s arms, panting and mewing, we hear the muffled sounds of limbs snapping, bodies being cleaved, each hiccupping death caw; the new hires have been found. “Let’s roll,” someone says, and we abandon the bathroom.

Layered bodies block the emergency exit stairwell. Bloodied viscera slides under the door into the hall from the conference room. Inside it sounds like forty tigers wrestling. We have to think. We know what our best move is, but we don’t want to admit it. We exchange looks; the burdened looks of having to make the tough decisions. They are familiar to us; we are executives. We are about to say, Our only way out is up , when we hear a man and woman giggling from just left of the center of our huddle.

Stan has yanked Susan’s blouse open, the buttons splaying from the torn threads. Her large purple nipple creases between his fingertips. And she’s started up her moaning again. Come on, you guys , we hiss, as in, That’s really unprofessional . But there they are. Now Stan’s shoes are off and his pants down, and he has surprisingly hard ropy legs atop which sits his marshmallow torso. Susan fondles his bobbing prick; it seems to nod yes. She is all the way nude, and her breasts fall much lower than we noticed before; they are not just big, which we’d known, but heavy, and her stomach protrudes enough that they seem to rest on it. And it isn’t that it isn’t attractive; it is just, again, surprising. And we marvel at how bodies never look naked the way they look in clothes. When will we learn ? we chide ourselves, and wish we’d spent more time admiring one another, our loved ones, ourselves.

From the conference room it sounds like forty alligators wrestling in a swamp, and tides of blood pulse out from under the door.

Stan and Susan clatter to the floor, their limbs jutting and tied together; our huddle is greatly disturbed.

“Leave them,” someone shouts. And we run.

Because this is our building, we know there is a short stairwell that continues above the regular stairwell — the one filled with bodies — beyond the Do Not Enter door. It has an unfinished quality, though it is safe. If anyone takes anyone anywhere during a holiday party, it is probably here, and it is probably low-level clerks, lonely new hires, our deceitful secretaries; they fumble past forgotten panels of drywall and unused rods of pipe to find a railing to get bent over, a wall to leverage against.

We clamber and slip over the flayed bodies blocking the door; the inside of their skin is slick, and sheets of their raw, violet muscle seem to spasm. We hope it is a trick of the wavering light. All the way down the stairwell is a thick corpse wall. Just as we’d expected. There would be no way to push through so many mangled parts of former employees.

Up we go.

Flickering work spotlights dangle here and there, smelling like the overtired motors of electronics; the stairwell is treacherous in a pall of brown light. We grope our way along the walls and rails. Up higher, lights blaze everywhere, and we have to shield our eyes. Workmen must have abandoned some project at the first sound of the alarms. Perhaps their bodies are part of the corpse wall.

And here we are.

We hear, “Wait,” and below appear Stan and Susan. They trail naked, and we can hear it bounding close behind them. Stan’s scared little prick flops between his legs and Susan’s breasts clap together with each panicked stride. They are holding hands, fingers entwined and intimate, like they’ve spent a lifetime strolling along, holding one another. And that’s real terror we see in their eyes, because they aren’t concerned just for their own survival but for each other’s. Their feet are bloodied, and they struggle, slip, tug each other along, they try to kiss and hug, and they cry and cry.

It follows their scent.

And oh, we can’t tell you what we see next, it’s just too horrible. And sad. But it buys us some time to get out to the roof.

When we heave the roof door we scatter a thousand pigeons who thought they’d found a good hiding spot. Think again, pigeons. We stack roof debris in front of the door to slow its advance.

The alarm wails over the whole city. From the roof edge we see people flooding into the streets, down the streets and onto the wide boulevards, along the boulevards and then out to the multilane highways, where vehicles stall in the scrum and drivers abandon them to join the swift-footed exodus; they spiral around exchanges that spill out to the state highways until those highways narrow into county roads through small towns and then vein into neighborhood lanes and dissolve into fields of hay; all those people fan out across that dead autumn yellow until they reach the woods, and then we can track their movement by the quivering of the treetops as the millions jostle those poor trunks and trammel the forest floor. It is like a great green rolling swell that will deliver them to the actual ocean’s edge, and we wonder what will happen then. Will they wade out in confusion? Or will they buck momentum, backpedal, scatter throughout the forests and mountains, decide speciously that they have a natural aptitude for survival-by-hiding-spot? We would have loved to know; and we could have: it’s a tall building, some say the tallest, and from here we can see everything. But just then the alarm quiets; the city has emptied save for us. And we notice a rhythmic rumbling under our shined shoes. It is finished with Stan and Susan, and it’s coming for us.