James Hynes: Kings of Infinite Space

Paul sat panting on the floor. They were in the second-floor elevator lobby of TxDoGS. The only light came from a street-lamp in the empty parking lot, through the tall windows of the stairwell. “Oh, God,” Paul said. “We’re at work.”

Callie jumped to her feet. Her clothes were still wet, her shirt still plastered to her skin. Sweat and condensation from the tunnel dripped off her face, and her palms and feet were coated with grime. She lunged suddenly, startling Paul, crossing the lobby to an office chair tilted to one side against the window. One of its wheels was broken, and someone had left it with a note taped to the back that read TRASH. Callie swung it into the air by its arms and jammed its broken undercarriage into the open trapdoor. It was too big to go down, but Callie stamped on the seat with her bare foot until the chair was tightly wedged in the hole.

Paul pushed himself to his feet against the wall, trying to catch his breath. “Callie, let’s just get out of here,” he said, but she continued to stomp on the chair, gritting her teeth and grunting with each blow. Finally he caught her by the arm and dragged her around the corner into the hall.

“Paul!” someone called from the far end, and Paul and Callie stopped short and clutched each other. The hall was full of shadow, and a tall silhouette was running heavily towards them in the dim light from the main lobby. Paul and Callie yelped simultaneously and ran back the other way. They hit the crash bar of the door to the outside landing, but it wouldn’t open, and Callie, howling wordlessly, began to pound on the glass with her fists. Up the hallway behind them the footfalls came closer, so Paul grabbed Callie by the wrist and pulled her away from the door and through the doorway into cubeland. He whirled her in front of him, then reached back and tugged at the door, which was usually propped open against the wall. It wouldn’t budge, so Paul kicked at the little hinged doorstop, painfully stubbing his bare toes, until it popped up and he was able to slam the door shut. He fumbled over the surface of the door until he found the deadbolt and locked it. Instantly a huge silhouette filled the narrow window down the center of the door, and the door shook violently under a series of blows.

“Paul!” cried a muffled voice, and Paul blundered backwards into Callie.

“C’mon.” She pointed across the dim cubescape. “We can use the exit by Rick’s office.”

Paul let himself be dragged for a few steps, but then he dug his heels into the carpet. “Wait wait wait,” he said, in an urgent whisper. “Listen.”

The hammering on the door had stopped; the figure in the window had gone away.

“Paul, goddammit, let’s go” Callie said, but Paul clutched her tightly and said, “Shh!”

It was sometime in the middle of Friday night, possibly even early Saturday morning, and the office was lit only by two or three widely spaced fluorescent fixtures. A little more light leaked through the outside windows from the building’s bright security lights, but for the most part the empty cubescape before them was in twilight, obscured as if by a mist. All around them, filling the midnight silence of the cubicles, Paul and Callie heard a steady creaking and the muffled murmur of voices. Both of them lifted their eyes to the suspended ceiling. The panels seemed to be bulging and shifting the entire length and breadth of the room.

“They’re up there,” breathed Paul. “They’re in the ceiling.”

Simultaneously they broke into a run, down the aisle past Paul’s cube, then right into the main aisle toward the copy machine, booking as hard as they could go for the exit at the other end. Callie ran in long strides, knees up, fists clenched, pumping her arms like a sprinter. Paul hammered after her, each impact of his bare heels jarring him all the way up his spine. Callie disappeared round the next turn, and Paul raced around the corner and blundered straight into her, nearly bringing them both to the floor. Callie had braced her heels, her hands pressed against the cube walls on either side of the aisle. Ahead of them, just outside the door of Rick’s office, the lower half of a pale man swung from a square gap where a ceiling panel had been shifted aside. His legs wriggled and he slipped lower, dangling by his fingertips, the ceiling creaking painfully above him. Then he dropped silently to the floor, crouching nearly on all fours, his fingertips brushing the carpet. It was Boy G. He lifted his pale moon face to Paul and Callie; his eyes gleamed through the lenses of his glasses. He smiled, baring his serrated teeth.

“Are we not men?” he whispered.

Behind him, over Nolene’s low-sided cube, another ceiling panel was already opening up, and Paul clutched Callie around her waist and heaved her up the aisle back the way they had come. They stopped again when they saw the blur of another pale man dropping out of the ceiling near the door where they had come in. Closer still they saw yet another pale man ooze head first out of a black hole in the ceiling; he curled around the lip of the hole like a fat spider until he dangled by his fingertips and dropped out of sight. Along the far side of the room Paul saw a pair of round, buzz-cut heads bobbing rapidly along the cube horizon, scurrying up the aisle.

“In here,” whispered Callie, and she dragged Paul into the large cubicle called “the library,” because of the tall metal bookcase full of TxDoGS regulations in ring binders just inside the door. It was where Paul had first gotten a good look at Callie, as she slouched against the wide worktable and sorted the mail amid the litter of pens, pencils, staple removers, and scissors. Just inside the door Callie started to heave on the metal bookcase, and Paul helped her pull it over onto its side across the doorway with an almighty clang. Ring binders cascaded to the floor about their feet and flopped open. Callie crouched and started snatching items off the work surface, but Paul stayed on his feet, glancing wildly about them. All around the room now panels were opening up in the ceiling — some pulled back, some twisted askew, some tumbling out of the hole into the cube beneath — an irregular checkerboard of black squares out of which descended feet, hands, moon faces. Murmuring filled the room like surf as pale men in white shirts and ties dropped onto desktops, chairs, and the tops of filing cabinets, punctuating the darkness with soft thumps and bangs. As the men sank below the cube horizon, Paul could feel each thump in the floor through the bare soles of his feet. He heard desk drawers opening and closing, and scampering in the aisles. The murmuring began to swell up the aisles and over the edges of the cubicle where he was trapped with Callie, a clackety-clack rhythm like a train, over and over again in an awful, whispering chant, “Are we not men? Are we not men? Are we not men?”

A sharp, electric whine startled him, and he looked down to see Callie crouched just under the edge of the work surface, an array of office supplies clustered around her on the carpet — a heap of pencils like pick up sticks, a steel letter opener, an enormous stapler. She was feeding one pencil after another into an electric pencil sharpener, but she did not take her eyes off the ceiling. Paul glanced up at it himself. The panels over the cube were rippling, and Paul heard creaking and the thrum of some metallic strut or support. At an especially loud creak, he ducked under the work surface, squeezing in next to Callie. The pencil sharpener ground away. Neither one of them looked at the other.

“You’re a son of a bitch,” muttered Callie.

“What?” said Paul.

“You heard me.” She laid the sharpened pencils in a fan at her feet. “When Olivia bared my throat and Colonel handed you the knife,” Callie hissed, still watching the ceiling, “what took you so long to do something?”