Breathe (8 page)

… as Clarke again raises his cricket bat.

12. FRIDAY 2:25 PM

Miranda has had a tough time getting downstairs. The lobby is in chaos as she reaches it. The main doors to the building are locked. She tries them all – same story. She runs to the dazed reception guard. ‘Is there a way of opening these manually?’ she asks.

The guard is catatonic, motionless. ‘I went to university,’ he tells her.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I have a master’s degree in art history. Just so that I could wind up as a fucking security guard. A fucking trained Alsation could do this job. A blind one. With three legs.’

‘The key. I need the door key.’

‘My mother didn’t raise me to stand watch over some rich fucker’s property.’

‘The key!’ she shouts, slapping his face hard and preparing to duck in case he hits her back. But it seems to do the trick.

‘There’s a single master that overrides all the deadbolts to the outer doors and the atrium.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Out there.’ The guard points through the glass to the foliage-covered annexe.

The white-eyed Swan is just finishing locking the door to the atrium from the inside. He pockets the special deadbolt key and continues to pull June behind him. Although she is now conscious again, he has tied her hands together. He drags her across the forest floor of the atrium. ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, you painted Jezebel,’ he pants. ‘My God, you could afford to lose some weight.’

Meera is small, but she’s fast. As Clarke swings his bat, she drops to her knees and grabs his raised boot, tipping him off-balance. Clarke is back on his feet in moments. Obsessive men have hidden reserves of power. Roaring like a bear, he slams Meera backward into one of the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, with tremendous force. The glass holds, but its surround doesn’t. The whole thing starts to crack around the edges. Clarke charges forward, pinning Meera against the glass with his orthopedic boot as the rest of the frame cracks.

Clarke shakes his head piteously. ‘If only you could have learned to wear a dress like the other girls.’ He pushes down hard.

The entire panel divorces itself from the frame and falls out, taking Meera with it.

She falls slowly at first, almost gracefully. Meera plummets through space, sailing down on the glass sheet.

As Swan manhandles June on her stomach across the atrium, June hears a strange noise – shattering glass – and looks up. Swan looks up, too. The sheet of glass carrying Meera explodes through the roof of the atrium. Non-lethal fragments rain down, but the great window pane lands on Swan, shearing him in half at the softest point of his waist, and spraying June in blood.

Meera falls through the roof into the top of a tall, artificial palm tree.

From inside the building, Miranda hammers on the doors. June looks up at her in a daze. ‘June!’ she shouts, ‘June! You have to get the key!’ But June is too stunned to register anything. ‘The key! In his pocket! The key!’

As June gathers her senses, she realises what Miranda is asking of her. She reaches into the still-twitching corpse’s jacket and fishes for the key. As she does so, the top half of Swan convulses violently, making her scream. The half-a-corpse latches onto her, pulling her over and trying to drag itself on top. The ragged stump of Swan’s spinal cord is poking out from the bottom of his rib cage, so June stamps on it. As Swan falls back with a gurgling yell, she grabs the key and makes for the entrance door.

She has trouble finding the lock, but spots it and inserts the key. While she’s trying to twist it, Half-Swan starts clawing at her. Oddly, his lower half appears to have died. It’s only the part with the brain in that she has to worry about now. His right hand is trying to lock itself around her ankle. This is definitely sexual harassment, as defined in the office bible.

13. FRIDAY 2:37 PM

Ben reaches the directors’ boardroom and bursts in.

The directors number a dozen men, no women – there’s a surprise. They are seated beside Dr Hugo Samphire, drinking coffee at the long, walnut-veneer table, which is surrounded by colour-coded plans on raised boards. Some are furtively eating digestive biscuits. The front-man is talking to his New York audience at the start of the satellite video presentation. They’re completely oblivious to what’s been going on below.

‘Who are you?’ Dr Samphire snaps at Ben. ‘The satellite presentation is about to start. What the hell do you mean by barging your way in here?’

Ben is momentarily dumbfounded. He looks at the wall vents, which should be pumping the same poisoned air into the room as in the rest of the building. ‘You give your staff different air,’ he says, amazed that Miranda has been right all along.

The directors are glancing at each other; how can an employee know about this? The audience on the video monitor is starting to look puzzled.

‘Kill the link,’ someone orders. ‘We’ll call them back.’ One of the directors breaks the satellite connection. ‘You have to leave right now. Somebody call security.’

Ben is starting to understand the true nature of management. ‘You don’t even know what’s going on down there, do you?’ he realises. One of the directors is trying to call security, but having no luck. ‘The line’s dead,’ he tells the others.

Dr Samphire’s sense of order has been affronted. ‘There’s nothing in the air that’s not perfectly safe to breathe,’ he bridles.

‘There’s a dead body in the main ventilation shaft.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Think so? Try breathing this.’ Ben goes to the door and slams it wide open. On the other side of the corridor, he wedges open the stairwell door. The poisonous air pours in, rolling across the floor like plague-pit fumes.

‘The compounds we’re using will all be fully approved.’

‘You added drugs.’

‘Only to enhance efficiency for the purpose of preparing today’s presentation.’ Dr Samphire tries to sound reasonable in a we’re-all-men-of-the-world way.

‘Meanwhile, just to be on the safe side, you had a separate air supply installed up here.’

‘We don’t need to work as hard as our staff. We’re directors.’

The directors are in an uproar. Nobody wants to risk breathing the bad air. They are arguing among themselves, two or three heading for Ben, when Clarke appears in the stairwell doorway. He has his razor-edged cricket bat slung across his back like some kind of Home Counties bounty hunter.

‘Mr Harper reports to me,’ Clarke explains. ’I’ll enjoy taking care of this.’

With the door between June and Miranda, June fights to get the deadbolt key in the bottom lock. Half-Swan appears to have vanished into the tropical undergrowth, wriggling away like some kind of grotesque reptile. Meera chooses this moment to fall out of the tree, hanging onto the palm fronds, and lands in the soft earth. With her sari torn open, Meera increasingly looks like a Bollywood action heroine, except when she opens her mouth.

‘Jesus Fuck. Ow. Bollocks.’

June is shouting for someone to help her. Meera grabs the key and turns it, opening the door. As she does so, and pulls herself and June through, Half-Swan springs from the bushes, hauling himself along by his hands, shoving his way inside with them. He slams the door shut, turns the key in the lock and makes off with it, dragging himself away into darkness.

‘Christ, what is keeping him alive?’ asks the shocked Miranda. She turns to June, who has fallen in beside her. ‘There’s got to be another way out.’ She looks at the torn and bleeding Meera. ‘What the hell happened to you?’

‘I fell out of the building, all right? We need to find Howard.’

‘Why?’

‘Let’s just find him, okay?’

Clarke walks Ben ahead of him, goading him with the razor-sharp tip of his cricket bat. ‘This is what happens when you leave your workstation unattended.’

‘Have you seen what’s going on down there?’

‘What’s the matter, Mr Harper, are you afraid of a little hard work?’

‘It’s not the work that bothers me, it’s the mass psychosis of a building filled with deranged, homicidal maniacs.’

‘That’s the trouble with people like you, Harper. There’s always an excuse.’ He swings the bat at Ben’s throat, and somehow manages to pin him to the railings by the handle. He produces a huge roll of silver tape and starts taping Ben up.

‘You killed Felix,’ says Ben, dumbly.

‘A little man trying to hold back a big industry. People like him – people like you – don’t deserve to survive. I bet you don’t even vote.’

‘Why did you hide his body in the air-pipe?’

‘To infect the others.’ Met with an uncomprehending stare, he sighs and explains. ‘From the day I started work, I just wanted to do my job well. After thirty years of late nights and no holidays, I became a supervisor. I had no friends, no woman, no life, but it didn’t matter. I sacrificed everything for my employers. Then along came Mr Draycott …’

… Clarke studied Draycott, hating his crisp, white shirt and gym-toned chest, hating the cool, young new boy with all the answers in his report. He raised his cricket bat, and his righteous anger did the rest.

Disposing of the body was a bit of a fag, though. He had to drag, shove, fold, drop and bend Draycott to get him inside the grille, ramming him through to the steel shaft below. As the body landed with a slam, his employment papers drifted down after him. Moments later, the air-con system started up. That, of course, was the problem right there …

‘Don’t you think I knew my days were numbered?’ Clarke hisses at him. ‘All I ever wanted was a little respect. A little acknowledgement. Was that too much to ask?’

Now completely taped up, Ben is stuck at the top of the stairwell. The worst thing is having to listen to his supervisor play the sympathy card. ‘I can see how you feel,’ he says carefully. ‘If you don’t have a job in this country, people treat you like shit.’

‘They treat you like shit if you do,’ warns Clarke, somewhat mollified. ‘When I come back, I’m afraid I’m going to have to terminate your contract.’

14. FRIDAY 3:05 PM

June, Meera and Miranda are keeping an eye out for Half-Swan, who has scuttled off again. They round a corner in the basement and find Howard in his deckchair, smoking dope and listening to the Chemical Brothers on his iPod. He smiles and peace-signs them.

‘Hey guys.’ Howard wants to high-five, but nobody’s in the mood. Half-Swan is sitting on top of a tool cabinet above him, poised to drop and attack. His colon is hanging below his shirt-tails.

Meera yanks Howard’s headphones off, pulling him backwards. She and Miranda drag Howard clear into the next room as Swan throws himself at the flimsy door, hammering it hard.

‘Don’t you know what’s happening up there?’ asks Meera.

‘Holy Jesus Mother Of God! What the fuck was that?’

‘Mr Swan,’ says June. ‘The top half of him, anyway. He’s kind of dead but he won’t lie down.’

‘No shit. Oh man, I warned you. No pain receptors, your brain keeps functioning as long as they tell your heart to keep beating. I fucking
knew
this would happen.’

‘How did you know?’ asks Miranda.

‘Oh fuck.’ Howard looks sheepish. ‘You’re looking for someone to blame, it’s me. I designed the SymaxCorp system.’

‘You?’

‘Yeah. I started when I was still at school – didn’t come out of my room for about three years. It was all theory, of course. Dr Samphire found me and made it happen. I ran it through every conceivable scenario, then pointed out the potential problems. He had some ideas of his own about those. He wanted to keep me where he could keep an eye on me. One of his little jokes; the whizz kid becoming the janitor. I don’t mind it down here. It’s cosy.’

‘I thought the directors were to blame,’ says Miranda, disillusioned.

‘Yeah, right. Most of them couldn’t find their own dicks with a microscope and tweezers. A profound lack of imagination is the only quality you need to rule the fucking world.’

Half-Swan slams himself at the plywood door, nearly breaking through.

‘How’s he kicking the door without any legs?’ June wonders.

Miranda looks around. ‘Is there another way out of here apart from the front doors?’

‘This isn’t like one of those
Alien
films where they keep pulling out maps of service pipes. Duh.’ Howard rolls his eyes.

‘Come on Howard, there must be something!’

‘Well obviously there’s a rubbish chute, but you can only get to it from the atrium, ’cause that’s where they take the recycling stuff.’

‘We can get there.’

‘The tunnel’s full of rubbish.’

‘We can clear it.’

‘And it’s welded shut.’

‘I thought you designed all this?’ Miranda accuses.

‘Don’t rush me,’ says Howard. ‘Somebody roll a joint while I’m thinking,’

Ben comes to. He’s tied to a wheeled desk chair with rolls of parcel tape. His mouth is taped. Perhaps Clarke wants to keep him alive as a sympathetic ear? He tries to move the chair, but it’s at the top of the stairwell flight, and one false move will send him to his death.

There’s a loose end to the tape. There’s also a trolley ramp on the first flight of stairs. Ben manages to fix the tape around the stair-rail with one hand. He kicks back. The chair tips down the stairs, spinning on its stem as the tape unravels. But it rolls too fast, shooting off the edge of the staircase and over into the stairwell. The tape pulls tight as he falls.

Ben and chair are yanked back, to hang suspended in space by the attached tape.

Miranda, Meera, June and Howard back away from the door, which is being violently battered and is splitting in half.

Howard points ahead. ‘There’s a cable tunnel that goes as far as the lobby, but it’s not very wide.’ He eyes June as he speaks. ‘I don’t know if she’ll go through.’

‘At least try – we’ll deal with the supervisor.’ Miranda looks like she’s been waiting for something like this all her working career.

‘If you guys are sure,’ says Howard, uncertainly.

‘He hasn’t got any bloody legs, Howard, all right? We can manage.’

Howard can’t wait to get out. He takes June with him. As Miranda and Meera barricade the breaking door, a dark shape shifts behind them. They turn around to find Miss Fitch in an alcove, chopping up documents on an old-fashioned paper-guillotine. She must have been there the whole time. She’s smoking hard and slugging vodka from the bottle.