

Acknowledgements.

I once worked in this building.

I credit that life with inspiring my love of horror and horrible, horrible things.

So, this is dedicated to anyone working a depressing, soul-crushing job.

May the zombies come for you first and eat quickly.

And thanks to Evan for ensuring that my soul-crushing hit the right note.

LZR-1143: Within

A Novella

of the

LZR-1143 Series

By:

Bryan James

Published by Bryan James.

Copyright 2012, Bryan James.

Smashwords Edition.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real persons, events or places is purely coincidental; any references to actual places, people or brands are fictitious. All rights reserved.

LZR-1143: Within

There are more than three hundred water bottling facilities on the Eastern Seaboard alone.

Each facility is privately owned and operated, controlled by boards of directors in distant cities with a distant appreciation for the circumstances that allow these plants to operate.

They are staffed by local employees, with management often dispatched from the corporate centers in Chicago, Atlanta, and other massive corporate hubs.

They employ an average of two hundred workers per plant. An average of seventy-five line operators, fifty machinists, thirty quality control specialists, ten marketing and branding engineers and specialists, ten accountants, ten managers, fourteen janitorial staff, and one operational security manager. In other words, one person responsible for controlling the security of each plant that processes tens of thousands of bottles of drinking water for tens of thousands of people.

Every day.

Of every week.

Power plants, airports, train stations, and even bus stations have more robust security than bottled water facilities. Even reservoirs and waste water plants have local government buy-in and oversight, motivated by a belief that drinking water and water supplies are inviolable and vital to local and national security.

But bottled water is a business. And regulations kill business.

Or so it was said.

In each of these plants, the single security officer may watch several monitors with half an eye or stroll lazily through the facility. He might watch the machines form the bottles and roll mechanically to the labeling machine. He would stroll past hundreds of workers, recognizing a few, and disregarding new or unfamiliar faces. He could absently observe the massive machines funnel purified water from huge vats in the ceilings into clear plastic bottles. He may yawn, having seen it several hundred times already.

Case by case, they roll out, passing under the heavy-lidded eyes of quality control specialists, whose job it is to ensure the labels are straight and the caps are sealed. They cannot check the quality of the water. There are too many, and they are not, after all, chemists.

Case by case, these bottles are sealed and labeled and loaded on trucks.

The single security officer returns to his office, and sits down.

Case by case, every day, the bottles of water move across the country.

In New York City, on just one of those days, it is early morning.

It is, in fact, a beautiful morning.

The daily accumulation of chemical and mineral particulates that commonly and routinely form smog above the city have not yet had the chance to aggregate into a cohesive cloud. The sun has not risen so far in the sky to yet produce the oppressive heat that this day will bring.

On this beautiful morning, the airport is not so busy that a delivery truck carrying pallets of mineral water is not unduly delayed in its scheduled arrival to Terminal A. Flashing a bright yellow badge and getting waved through the checkpoint by a yawning security contractor who barely looks up from his newspaper, the truck parks in the loading dock, emitting the familiar high-pitched beeps as it reverses. A hefty man emerges from the cab, moving quickly to lift the back gate and offload his wares.

The pallets are disbursed amongst the vendors, their single contract with this DHS-approved supplier making deliveries easy and fast. The bottles are divided and moved to the stores, as they replace older supplies that are dwindling in the heat that has lasted far too long into the fall.

Inside the terminal, the volume of daily travelers slowly increases as the day moves on. Passengers that had brought their own water, having been forced to relinquish their own supplies, pass through security and purchase the newer bottles, knowing that they will likely be met with overworked flight attendants and an undersupply of liquid in the air. They think nothing of purchasing a water bottle from the vendors inside the airport, just as they would think nothing of purchasing a water bottle from a grocery store.

As the day moves on, these travelers wait in lines to board their planes. They talk, and laugh, and sigh loudly at delays. They yell at flight attendants and they walk listlessly in the terminal. A father of two boards a plane bound for Omaha, destined for a short business trip and a return that night.

A young man waits anxiously to board the plane to visit his father in Denver. An older woman in a severe business suit stares unrelentingly at her smart phone, willing the time to go by faster, for life to pass just a tad quicker. The travelers have places to be, and people to meet. They have purpose.

Unbeknownst to these travelers, to any but a select few, on this day of this month of this year, their water has a purpose as well. The water bottles purchased from this airport board countless planes, bound for countless destinations within the United States and abroad: nearly one flight every sixty-four seconds, to be precise.

The delivery driver whistles tunelessly as he finishes his delivery, and returns to his warehouse, scheduled for more than eighty-seven more deliveries that day, mostly to large grocery stores and big-box consumer outlets.

And in every state of the union, drivers in similar trucks, dressed in similar uniforms, and whistling similar songs, deliver water from the same company to more than one hundred other airports.

In New York City, the sun rises just slightly, and the day starts to heat up.

***

Louis groaned as he typed, willing the digits on the clock to move faster, to please change. But the damnable red digits hung stubbornly and cruelly, smiling in their own way at his pain.

Dear Valued Customer,

I regret to inform you that BankFirst cannot reverse the $75.00 overdraft charge assessed to your account for your debit card purchase dated September 7, in the amount of $0.45 at Gas and Gulp, Trenton. Please refer to your membership agreement for further details.

Thank you for being a member of the BankFirst team. We value your business.

Sincerely yours,

Louis

Online Customer Service Representative 09827

04:21, PST

Louis cringed as he filled the amount, date and location fields in the pre-filled form, shuddering as another part of his soul died a small, undignified death, screaming in the hollows of his conscience.

Get out.

Get out.

Get out.

He clicked in the appropriate fields, proofing the message once so that the quality control pricks in San Francisco wouldn't send him an annoying email the next morning. He hovered his mouse over the bright green "Send" button momentarily, considering for the thousandth time, deleting the pre-drafted, pre-cleared response, and writing his own.

Dear Customer,

Get a new bank. Seriously. How can you put up with a $75.00 overdraft charge on a $0.45 purchase? What, were you buying a stick of gum? A half bottle of soda? What the fuck can you buy with $0.45 these days? A perforated condom? A four day old hot dog? Get your shit straight and drop this bank like a bad damn habit. Peace out.

Love always and tenderly ... to your mom.

Love, Louis

But he didn't. Because he had rent to pay. And a girlfriend to entertain. And a yappy little dog who vomited in his shoes.

So he kept coming in. He kept reading the same outraged emails, and he kept pushing back the same canned responses.

He glanced up once from his screen, rubbing the back of his neck with a sweaty palm, and sighing loudly, as he frequently did in the bright, soul-sucking glow of his cheap Taiwanese computer screen.

One window. That's all he'd need to feel human. Just one. Something to wander by during a break. Something to stare at in boredom. Yes, he would be staring out into the night, but the knowledge that outside this building, someone, somewhere was living a life--any life--would have been nice.

But no.

He was here.

Without windows.

Without hope.

Louis worked the night shift at an online customer service hub in Harbor Island, Washington. On duty from eight PM to five AM, he and his shift were responsible for delivering responses to email inquiries from customers across the country. They were one of the few stations that hadn't been outsourced to India or the Philippines, and they survived on xenophobia alone. Focus groups conducted a year ago by special "efficiency consultants" had revealed the likelihood of a nine percent customer attrition among Southeastern states in the face of expanded fees if they could not speak to a "real American" when they called or wrote to complain. So the bank did the American thing. They kept the jobs in the U.S., even the online jobs, and jacked their fees through the roof. Customer attrition to date was a mere two percent.

Win for the bank.

Loss for Louis, and for his will to live.

He had survival down pat. But living ... That wasn't something he didn't do. He knew how to bring home just enough money to feed his stupid, vomiting dog and pay for movies and take out Thai food and the too-high insurance for his crappy car. But he wasn't the guy sky diving or jogging or having fun with friends at the pub. He wasn't even the guy that finished college, or vocational school. He was the guy who got the crappy job he had because he had applied at the right time, and he clung to it like a miserable sinking life raft, halfway hoping that it would sink beneath him and give him a reason to swim away.

Or sink to the bottom.

He exhaled loudly and rubbed his eyes, glancing around one more time as if willing the building to change. Across the room, someone coughed, emphasizing the absurd size of the building that seemed to somehow mock, just by existing, his total insignificance.

The hub was a massive, dark, windowless building. During the day shift, it employed more than five hundred people, all within one gigantic, cubicle-filled room. The building was a gigantic rectangle the size of three football fields, and if you stood against the east wall, you could stare across the entire expanse and make distant eye contact with anyone standing against the western side. Four and a half foot cubicles obscured all but the heads of the diligent workers, and fluorescent lights bathed the space, day and night. Windows, deemed a security risk and a distraction, were nonexistent. The only inlets of daylight were through the front door, and only when it was open, and the small skylight in the depressing employee lounge upstairs. Due to the secure nature of their accounts, and in what Louis considered a drastic overreaction to an incident of data theft by a former employee, the remainder of the building was locked down and closed out. No external internet, no personal phone lines, and no television. Terminals that networked to the internal systems and the bank's own websites glowed around him, most flickering the floating screen savers and scrolling marquees so common in large companies.

It was a dreary, drab and utterly depressing place to work, but in an era when Washington's unemployment rate exceeded twelve percent, it was a place of employment. So Louis came to work, every night.

"Yo, Louie, dude. This guy spent five grand on a strip club in Vegas, and now he's emailing me from an IP address in Nevada, saying he didn't do it. That he's in New York. Nice, right? Something to be said for plausible deniability, right?"

Louis raised his head, shaking his shaggy, oily hair out of his face and pushing his glasses back up his nose. He glared at the young man hanging over the edge of his gray cubicle wall, ear and nose rings glittering in the dull fluorescence of the overhead lights.

Cam leaned back, drumming his hands energetically on the side of the cube walls as he smiled largely, his wide, pimpled face ebullient at discovering a scandal.

"So?" said Louis, rendered soulless and humorless for the fiftieth time tonight. He punched "Send" absently, and the computer instantly pulled up the next message to be answered. A small clock in the upper right hand of the dull flat screen monitor reset to zero and began ticking off the seconds, timing his response rate for the next message. Louis sighed, scanning the text of the message.

"So?" His voice was incredulous and plaintive. "Dude."

"We don't get that much variety in here. This shit is awesome compared to ... well, whatever you're reading now. In fact, I bet you a can of pop that I can guess the subject of that email that just jammed your queue." His face was excited and over caffeinated. Louis sighed again, waving his hand absently.

"Sure Cam, whatever." He read the text quickly, rolling his eyes as he did, knowing that Cam would be able to guess, and already fatigued by the hours of gloating that his empty victory would entail.

"Okay, so it's ..." he turned his head, looking at the large clock on the far wall, the bright red numbers indicating the current time. "Two twenty-four. You're pretty quick, so I'm guessing you have your queue time to less than an hour, which means someone sent a message between one and two o'clock PST. It's Friday night--or Saturday morning--so the sender was either drunk, bored, or hopelessly hopeless, emailing his bank on a Friday night."

He cocked his head theatrically as Louis started typing. Behind him, Bridget snorted as she read the email over Louis' shoulder. She tossed her bright blue hair and sat down heavily in her chair, blowing a small bubble and popping it as she sucked the candy into her mouth. Her small legs shot out from under the desk and she slammed her feet onto the desk top.

"He doesn't need your help Bridg, thanks," said Louis, smiling despite himself as he hovered his mouse over the "Send" button.

"Dude. Done. Drunk email, from a guy with no money in the account, who's never had anyone listed as a co-owner. I'm guessing Alabama or Florida panhandle IP address?" Cam leaned forward, arms crossed on the cubicle wall, grin unbearable.

Louis smiled slowly and shook his head as his finger tapped the left hand button on the mouse, sending the curt response back to the nether regions of online space.

Behind him, Bridget laughed out loud and snapped a rubber band from the palm of her hand, sending it twirling past Louis and hitting Cam's cubicle wall.

"Yeah, okay. But that one was a gimme. Wait for ..."

Louis cut off as the entire building was suddenly plunged into complete darkness. The incessant and droning hum of hundreds of computers was silenced at once, shrouding the building in an instant cloak of inky black quiet.

***

In Chicago, it was a man in a hotel, drinking a cup of coffee before his job interview. His gray suit, slightly tattered at the edges so that the cheap wool was fraying almost imperceptibly, soaked in the majority of the scalding liquid as he collapsed on the table.

A waitress reached his side as he rolled on the ground in pain, voice hoarse and face constricted with pain. It was the reddened eyes and the hollowed cheeks, more than anything else, that made her call 911.

In Miami, it was a valet at the airport, gasping for air on the asphalt in front of the Delta terminal.

In Houston, a gardener collapsed on his pruning sheers; in Minneapolis, a teenage girl fell from her desk in homeroom; in Omaha, an elderly woman collapsed at her mailbox.

In cities and states; in towns, cars and trucks, and hotels and airplanes across the nation, something was happening.

***

Across the cavernous space, someone gasped loudly in the unexpected quiet. The sound of sudden movement echoed in the large, mostly-empty space as Bridget cursed behind him.

The night shift only had ten workers. It was Louis' team of three, another four phone representatives, two personal bankers that had to be available at all hours for the high value clients, and one manager, Rajesh, whose voice rose over the thin gray line of cubicle walls to Louis' left.

"Everyone stay calm, I'm sure it's just a breaker." His slightly lilting accent belied his upbringing in Seattle, and Louis blinked as the power flickered on once, then cut out again, replaced this time with bright red emergency lights. Flood lights near the exits suddenly glared in the red world, and across the large room someone fell against the ground hard, blinded by the sudden illumination. Despite himself, Louis guffawed loudly, drawing a smile from Cam as he glanced back over his shoulder.

Behind Louis, Bridget was on her cell phone, trying to get a signal. She raised her hand above her head, squinting in the dark.

"Not gonna happen, Bridg," said Cam, walking into the aisle between the cubicles and patting his hip pocket suggestively, the bulge of his large geek-phone apparent in his corduroy cargo pants. "You know that reception is for shit in this crypt."

"Hey Voj," said Louis, standing from his chair and looking in the direction of the night manager, who shot him a dirty look from his slightly larger cubicle. "Any info on this? Can we go home?"

Unlike the rest of the minions on night watch, Rajesh was allowed foliage, and a veritable cornucopia of pothos plants surrounded the diminutive man as he glared back at Louis, resenting the suggestive nickname they had given him early in their tenure together. Ironically, Louis wasn't quite sure whether Rajesh understood the sexual connotations intended by Bridget when she created it--based entirely on the way he pronounced his R's. No, Louis was pretty sure that the man simply took umbrage with the lack of respect for his authority.

"Nothing yet, but I'm sure it's just temporary. I'm going to go to the front desk and ask security." He turned the corner to leave his cube, and remembered Louis' second question abruptly. "No, you ..."

He paused, realizing he should make the announcement louder, and for broader distribution. He raised his voice, projecting over the cubicle walls, his accent and high-pitched voice familiar to all the workers.

"No one leaves. As far as you are all concerned, this is temporary. I will find out what happened. Stay at your desks and do not panic. We must keep the queue times to a minimum."

He turned on his heel, his portly frame bouncing slightly under the brisk pace and Louis frowned at the officiousness of the small, contemptible man.

From the area where the personal bankers worked, Louis heard someone throw back loud enough to be audible, but soft enough not to carry to Rajesh.

"Did he say stare at your breasts and call a mechanic?"

The section laughed nervously, indulging in the favorite pastime of mocking the man's accent as an impotent way to rebel against his meager authority. Louis chuckled, reaching into his own pocket as he did so, just to confirm he didn't have a data signal either. He switched on the data function and held the phone up in the air, searching for a signal.

No bars.

He wandered to the next aisle, still trying.

No joy.

The building sucked cell phone batteries for breakfast if you didn't turn off your data plan when you got there. Your phone would spend hours trying to detect a signal if you left your wireless data on--the solid cement structure with its thick, windowless walls wasn't accommodating to cellular reception.

From the customer service section four rows over, Louis heard a voice rise above the chatter.

"Anyone got cell coverage?" It was a large hispanic man with a friendly voice--Antonio, Louis thought. His tall frame rose from beyond the cubicle walls, raising a corded phone in one hand. "These lines are dead. The hard lines, I mean."

Louis raised his eyebrows in the red-tinged darkness. That was strange. A power outage shouldn't cut the phones. He glanced toward the front of the building, looking for any sign of Rajesh.

"Nah, got nothin' here," replied Cam, as Bridget shook her head. "Maybe out front?"

As Cam's last word left his mouth, a hollow pounding sounded faintly in the distance. It was sporadic, and inconsistent, as if someone were pounding on a piece of metal or wood with a solid object.

"Good, someone's on it," said Bridget dismissively, turning to Cam. "Want to play gin?"

***

They started to collapse amid the rush of society, bodies falling into lunches and streets, in conferences and showers, during meetings and on buses, while onlookers recoiled from the spectacle.

In cities throughout the country, the cases began as isolated calls to 911. Frightened people calling professionals for an answer.

Clearly, these people were sick.

At first, the first responders called it the flu. No one else had a better idea.

The doctors were stumped.

They had never seen anything like it.

And they never would again.

***

Louis sat at his desk for fifteen minutes, listening to Cam and Bridget argue over the rules of gin, and slightly enjoying his break as he simply zoned out. In the distance, the hammering was a constant sound, and after a while, Louis began to wonder if there was someone trapped somewhere. Rising from his chair and past the still-arguing Cam and Bridget, Louis walked slowly to the end of the aisle, starting toward the front entrance, where the security booth was located next to the front door. Across the open space, several others from the phone customer service were circling their chairs in the aisle, chatting and cracking jokes. The building was eerily quiet with the power out, and he missed the hum of the electronics and the buzzing of the cheap, energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs.

Suddenly, a large form appeared in front of him, a hand reaching out as he stumbled in surprise. A strong grip seized his arm, pulling him forward.

"Whoa, man. I work here. It's aight." Antonio's huge form materialized clearly in the damnable red light and Louis took a deep breath, smiling in relief.

"Yeah, sorry dude. Just a little on edge. Something about this ..."

"Doesn't feel right? Yeah, man. I hear ya. Headin' up front?"

Louis nodded. "Seems like maybe they have a television or something in there. Worst case, we can grab a cell signal maybe?"

Antonio cocked his head to the side and smiled. "My thoughts exactly. Let's see what's to see."

The red lights bathed the mundane cubes in a surreal glow. It was a hellish landscape of a different sort, with the red color lending a flaming indictment to the hell that was cube-dwelling. Louis almost expected a comically overdressed devil figure to emerge from one of the large corner units, small plastic horns crookedly proclaiming its identity as the king of the underworld. The empty units, however, remained quiet, bathing in the red glow of the dim lights as he and Antonio passed quickly, their steps making only the small sound that thick rubber soles make on cheap industrial-grade carpet.

The entrance to the building was a stand-alone vestibule. A large doorway opened into a smaller rectangle with metal detectors on both ends, and the blacked out doorways beyond. The thick metal of the reinforced entrance doors was recessed in the cement walls. On one side of the small room, a thick glass booth normally contained a security officer in a well-lit fish-tank, monitors glowing happily on all sides.

Today, as they approached, they could see that the power was out in the booth as well, a red floodlight filling the darkness inside. The exterior doors, of course, were shut. Antonio even tried the handles, but shrugged when they wouldn't open.

"Musta locked 'em for some reason," he suggested, nodding toward the guard booth.

Louis turned, eyes scanning the interior of the booth for signs of the sole security officer that worked the nights with them. Tonight, it had been Tiny--the massively obese and ironically nicknamed man who sat every evening looking so forlornly at the attractive women that passed his booth. Louis caught himself hoping that nothing had happened to the man, then asked himself why he thought anything had happened.

He had no answer. Just a feeling.

"Any sign of them in there?" asked Antonio, walking quietly across the linoleum entranceway and scanning the doors once more. In the red glow, his slightly lined face looked solemn and concerned.

"Nothing. No power in the guard booth either, which is weird. I mean, shouldn't the booth here have some sort of back up?"

Antonio nodded and put his hands to the glass, cupping his eyes and scanning the room.

"You try the door?" he asked, leaning back from the wall and moving toward the large metal door marked "Authorized Entry Only." Louis stepped forward, putting his hand on the handle and pushing it down. It clicked loudly, the lever-type handle moving only a fraction of a millimeter before stopping. It was locked.

"Well, shit. Okay." Antonio put his hands on his hips as Louis looked back into the large warehouse of a building from the doorway. In the far distance, he could see shadows in the red light as the small groups moved against the flood lights and emergency beams.

"What about the break room?" Louis asked, wondering absently if the two men had gone upstairs to try for cellular reception in the small, dingy employee lounge.

"Worth a shot," said Antonio, and he smiled quickly. "I could use a soda."

They made their way to the main staircase, which ran along the nearest wall and led to the upper floor of the building. Nearly as large as the bottom floor, it was unoccupied during the night shift, but was the only area in the building that had anything approaching a lounge. A small, windowless room in the middle of the top floor with one microwave, one fridge, and three small tables, all for hundreds of employees. It was a masterpiece of a design flaw, and one that you quickly learned to cope with by bringing lukewarm lunches and living with cold coffee. But it was the only room in the building with a view of the outside. In the very center of the small room, recessed deeply into the ceiling, was a single, two foot by two foot skylight, that was famous for its cellular signal-permitting attributes. If the two men had gone anywhere, it would have been this room.

They reached the top of the stairs and paused. This floor was darker than the first, as few lights were active. Possibly due to the reduced occupancy at night, or preprogrammed to dim on motion sensors. Whatever it was, they stumbled to find the straight, somewhat wider pathway through the maze of human rat traps to the small lounge. Louis cursed once as he tripped on what resembled a dying ficus plant and nearly swallowed the edge of the closest cube. He caught himself, hand grabbing the edge of the wall and shaking the cubicle loudly. On the desk, a book fell against the hard plastic desktop and the crack of plastic on plastic made Antonio jump and turn around.

"What?" asked Louis, defensive about his perennial clumsiness. He had never been an athlete or, for that matter, anything remotely approaching an athlete. He didn't play sports, and he didn't work out. He didn't sweat, unless the club where his favorite band was playing was too hot. He didn't jog or power walk or rollerblade. He just sat. All day, every day. On the weekdays, he sat at work. On the weekends, he sat in front of the television, or at the coffee shop, or in the pub.

Antonio shook his head and kept walking, his hands held out to his sides. As they reached the dark mass in the center of the large room where the blurred view of the rest of the building was blocked by the lounge, Louis spoke loudly.

"Yo, Voj. You in there, man? What's the story?"

Antonio stopped walking, waiting for an answer. From ahead, the silence was dead and ominous.

"Hey Rajesh, you in here? Answer me, dude. We're getting a little concerned here. Why are the doors locked down? I'd call this a little bit of a fire risk, wouldn't you?" Louis kept walking until he got to the break room, which was illuminated inside by a single, dull red emergency light. Immediately, his eyes were drawn to the sky light, which simply reflected a dark sky above. Nothing in the room was amiss. No spilled water or coffee, no burned food, nothing at all to indicate anyone had been there recently. Antonio followed Louis in and crossed his arms as he leaned against the door frame, his back to the large room behind him.

"Well, I guess they ain't up here," he said, scanning the room from top to bottom, eyes lingering on the open window.

As he finished his sentence, they both jerked their heads to the side as they heard the clear sound of someone walking slowly toward them through the cubicles on the other side of the break room. Instinctively, they went silent, moving through the small room to the doorway, and peering into the darkness. Beyond the first row of cubes, the outline of a clumsy form was visible against the bright light of an emergency flood. The person's hands flailed out to the sides, and it limped slightly, making its way forward, toward where they stood.

"Rajesh?" said Louis, eyes narrowing in the low light to try to pick out the form.

Suddenly, the unknown walker stumbled and fell, leaving their field of vision. Louis shot forward, eager to know who it was and what they were doing. Behind him, Antonio's footsteps followed. Louis turned the corner of the last cube and saw the sprawled form and stepped back, disgusted.

"Damn it, Cam. What the hell, man?"

The skinny form on the floor twitched once, and sat up slowly, holding his shin and breathing heavily through his teeth.

"What? You're the only ones allowed to leave the crypt down there?"

He made a pained face and rocked on his bony ass, like a child who had fallen from his bike.

"I told you, man. Don't call it that. I hate that shit. I get claustrophobic." Louis resisted the urge to kick the young man, and backed up, offering a hand instead. "What are you doing?"

"Same thing as you Hardy Boys, looking for a cell signal." He pulled himself up, and pushed his greasy hair from his eyes.

Louis, stunned momentarily by the reference to the Hardy Boys, stuttered even as Antonio filled in. "Good idea, but we were actually looking for Rajesh and Tiny. You see any sign of them on the other stairwell?"

Cam snorted as he limped toward the break room. "Voj and Tiny, huh? That's a power couple from hell, huh? Naw, nothing. Stairwell's dark as shit, too. Only one light on in there. That's how I hit my other shin." He looked back over his shoulder at them as he crossed into the break room. "You guys get a signal?" He pulled his phone from his pocket and tapped several keys quickly.

"We didn't have time ..."

"Yeah, I got something. Hold up." He was in the techno-zone now, and Louis knew better than to try to break through to him. He waved off Antonio, and even in the dim light, he could tell that Antonio understood.

He watched as Cam squinted and tapped, moving the phone around in odd positions, and finally reaching up toward the skylight in the ceiling.

"Got something," he said, and Louis watched over his shoulder as Cam dialed a number and put the phone on speaker.

"All circuits ... busy now ... back again." The robotic female voice was crackly and insistent, and Cam tried calling three more times before flipping into text mode, tapping a quick message to a friend. The message loaded slowly, then beeped once, a small red exclamation point appearing next to the outbound message.

"Shit, man. I don't know. The cell network's wonky." Cam said, punching the send button again for good measure.

Suddenly, Louis remembered something he had heard on the radio. Some guy had been trapped in his car during an avalanche, and his phone wouldn't make a call. But he had internet service because the two services were different networks. When the first responders got to him, he was updating his status on social media and even posted a picture of them getting through the snow.

"You got data on that?" Louis asked, and received a withering look from Cam.

"Dude, seriously? How do you think I check the game center leader boards and my Twitter account? Come on." Suddenly Cam's eyes widened in understanding.

"Right, gotcha. Hold up." He punched a series of buttons and exclaimed briefly. "I've got a signal!"

Antonio's voice sounded from near the vending machine, where he had been examining the meager offerings.

"Check the local news first, see if there's anything. Maybe a tornado or something?"

Cam nodded and punched the application icon on his home screen. Louis watched as the internet browser loaded the front page of the local news, and backed up as Cam shifted to follow a stronger signal, moving out of Louis' view.

"What the ...?" Cam's voice was bewildered and confused, and his finger tapped the screen once to zoom in.

"What, Cam?" Louis was anxious and tired. Two AM was two AM, no matter what hours you worked, and he was starting to grow concerned.

"God damn it, I can't get the connection to load the page... Hold on, that might ... What the...?" Cam's voice was quiet and slightly disbelieving.

His eyes were flying over the words, his finger scrolling quickly. Behind him, Antonio shifted his weight audibly and inhaled slowly.

"Dude, out with it for fuck's sake!" said Louis, his voice tinged with the anxiety he felt so strongly.

"It's ... it looks like its some sort of disease or something outside but the page keeps hanging up. Fuck!" he shook the phone and looked away in disgust.

"That's it," he said, looking at them. "God damned phone decided it needed to reload the page and I lost what I had."

There was a moment of silence as all three men digested the limited news.

Then, Antonio exhaled in frustration and cursed under his breath, even as Louis slapped Cam on the shoulder to get his attention, "Come on Cam, reload the page. This can't be because of some bird flu shit. What the fuck is happening out there?"

"Dude. Seriously. That's all I got. The first paragraph is still cached though, I can show you..." His voice crackled slightly. His finger was scrolling through a half-empty page as Louis craned his neck to read over his shoulder. The internet connection bar slowly crept to the right, indicating a slow page load.

"God damn it, Cam..."

"See for yourself, man," he said almost frantically, voice fearful as he shoved the phone at Louis. Louis took the phone, shaking his head as he stared at the small text, only half loaded on the small screen.

The story was one of only partial information. Cam had only been able to save a quarter of the page from being deleted by his phone's automatic refresh, and the news was incomplete and fragmented. A sickness of some sort, people falling down, and people dying. Overloaded hospitals and a spreading contagion. Spreading fast.

That's where the story stopped, mid-sentence.

Louis looked up, and his heart started racing.

This was impossible.

***

The cases were no longer isolated. In cities across the country, hospitals reported mass casualties on an epic scale. Vomiting, nausea and fever were the first symptoms, then unconsciousness. Then, ultimately, death.

But that wasn't the worst of it. That was just the beginning.

As the day wore on, hundreds of patients became thousands, and thousands became tens of thousands. Emergency responders were overwhelmed by a deluge of frantic calls from helpless people. As one patient was delivered to the hospital, ten more called in. Police and fire units began to respond, to give the affected some sense of normalcy. To help assure people that help was coming.

Then, the unthinkable began to occur. Those who had so recently perished from this rapidly onsetting disease, those who had so recently been alive and well; those whose bodies now jammed the morgues and makeshift mortuaries in hospitals and fire stations and churches across the country; those people began to rise again.

By mid-afternoon, even as Louis was closing his car door and walking the long, lonely walk to the front door of the large banking building--hours before he would stand huddled in the employee lounge bent over a small cellular phone--reports of the dead rising began to make their way to the airwaves.

***

Louis shook his head in disbelief, unable to believe that the power outage was somehow related to this story--this story that was only a blip on the news when he drove to work only hours ago. He had dismissed it then, as he was tempted to dismiss it now. Some sort of SARS, pig flu, bird flu, yada yada crap.

He never bought into that shit. It was always overhyped and overdone. Sensationalized.

It had to be something else.

But what if it wasn't?

What if it was a plague or an epidemic or something like that? And they were all trapped in a windowless, locked, dark building together.

A building in which anyone could be infected.

He looked at Cam and back to Antonio, eyes uncertain hand shaking slightly as he handed the phone back. He stepped back until he felt his back hit the cheap gray counter next to the sink.

"What, Louis? You can't tell me that you're pushing this shit too, are you?" Antonio's voice was raised and anxious, his hands moving quickly as he talked. From the room outside the lounge, a single emergency light popped and fizzled out.

Louis gestured at Cam, who handed the phone to the larger man. His eyes still dubious, Antonio took the small device and started reading. Louis turned around and walked woodenly to the soda machine, plunking three quarters in and pressing the button. Nothing happened. His quarters shot out the bottom and he tried again. Nothing. Then he remembered, the power was out.

Right.

Its funny how your body remembers motion and habitual action, even when your brain knows better, he mused.

"Well this has to be a joke, right? I mean, I saw all that bullshit on the news this evening too, but the news always makes mountains out of chipmunk asses, right?" Antonio's hand was shaking slightly as he handed the phone back to Cam. "I remember the SARS scare and the bird flu and the monkey flu and the elephant flu and all that crap from years ago. Didn't come to anything. Why should we think this is any different?"

His voice was aggressive, as if hoping to pummel Louis and Cam into submission on this point. They were silent, thinking of the implications. Cam was staring at the phone, trying to get the rest of the page to load.

"Shouldn't be doing this," he muttered, voice trailing off into a mumble as he stared at the small screen.

Antonio continued, "We have to see what's happening outside. That's probably where Rajesh and Tiny went, right?"

He turned, walking out the doorway leading back to the front entrance. Louis nodded mutely and awkwardly fumbled the three quarters back into his pocket, still wondering absently whether the pop inside was still cold.

Cam was staring at his screen, still muttering.

"Cam, you coming?"

For several seconds he was silent, then spoke softly.

"I think the internet's out." Cam's normally boisterous voice was soft and quiet. As if such a thing we not possible.

Louis stared into space for a moment, then simply turned and left the room, leaving a confused looking young man, staring at a blank screen in the dark.

***

The first report of a bite was in Washington D.C.

A hot dog vendor on the mall was attacked from behind by a homeless man. The assailant had died the night before, huddled in the corner of a national park restroom in a pool of his own vomit.

Park police took the man down, two of the officers suffering bite wounds in the altercation. The vendor, a recent immigrant from Guatemala, fled the scene immediately, afraid that he would be forced to go to the hospital and present documentation. He couldn't be deported, he had a family. The wound was small, and although his shoulder throbbed painfully, he decided to pick up his daughter early from school and go home.

He made it to the school, but he never left. Nor did his daughter.

The two officers received basic first aid for the wounds on their arm and hand respectively, and were cleared to return to work. One returned to his post at the Lincoln Memorial before keeling over on the monument steps merely hours later. The second was admitted to George Washington University Hospital amidst a wave of suspected flu patients.

As unbelievable as it seemed--so unbelievable that news organizations were hesitant to report on it until well into the event--throughout the city, and around the nation, the recently reanimated were rising from the dead and attacking the living.

When every person who was bitten joined the ranks of the infected, this plague, this new winnower of humanity, moved from being a mere biological epidemic to being an exponential conqueror of an entire race.

***

"What else did it say?"

"Did you get through to anyone?"

The voices rose almost as a chorus as they sat in a large circle between cubes and rolling chairs. One loud, indignant voice cut through the rest.

"Are you fucking kidding me, man? You have got to be joking. We're not drunk high schoolers on a field trip here. You are not going to scare us with some story about gonorrhea-ridden homeless shits stumbling around the parking lot. This is a group of grown ass adults at the end of a long, soul-killing night shift. If you are even moderately being a dill-wad about this shit, I swear to God ..."

Louis had never particularly cared for Ty, the preppy looking kid in the skinny jeans and polo shirt, complete with popped collar and a Kabbalah bracelet. He was fresh out of some small, private college and was already working the wealth management portfolio, where the job paid hourly and on sales commissions. The kid drove a beamer already, and had a huge ego that was on display as he questioned Antonio.

Antonio was tired and his face drawn. He had spent the last half hour trying to open the three different sets of exit doors to no avail. They had been locked from the security booth, and couldn't be opened from either side, something that they all considered to be impossible, unless Tiny had somehow tripped some sort of internal security measures that locked the building down. Otherwise, it was a massive fire code violation that could cost the company dearly in fines. Unless, of course, someone considered a municipal fine a small problem, compared to ... other things that might be happening. Louis was tempted to believe the latter, in light of the circumstances.

"I'm just telling you what we read. No Tiny, no Rajesh, and no exit. We spent some time in the security booth looking at the controls for the building, but wanted to give you all a heads up first. There has to be a master switch for the doors and the emergency systems, and we'll find it."

Ty guffawed loudly and crossed his skinny arms across his chest, purple polo shirt pulling tightly against his narrow shoulders below a smug grin.

"Yeah, you'll find it. Like you found the exit? Like you read the 'news' about the evil, nasty plague outside?" His voice was dripping with sarcasm, and a soft chuckle drifted from a cubicle in the back of the group. Louis stared over the backs of the group, noting the numbers on the clock and wondering what time sunrise was today. Not that it mattered in their windowless cell, but the thought of facing ... whatever was out there ... in the dark was much more daunting.

Antonio stood up, his large form tall and silent for a moment. Louis wondered if he would be so kind as to visit some manner of bloody violence on the preppy twerp, but was disappointed when Antonio's maturity rose to the occasion.

"Listen carefully. All of you." His voice was low and serious. "We know what we've told you. The news reported a disease spreading out there. That's all we know. We can't get the doors open to check it out, and we don't know exactly what happened to the power. We're operating on limited information, so if it helps, think of it as rabies, or the flu, or the damn clap if it helps you relate." He glanced quickly at Ty, and then back at the group.

"But the bottom line? We are trapped inside a windowless, powerless building. We don't know if we can get out, but we know that outsiders can't get in. So I suggest that we focus on finding a way out, but not using it until we know what's going on. That means we need to figure out the security systems, and find functioning phones or internet or text or any other form of communication. Any bright ideas? I'll take smoke signals if it's necessary. How about you, frat-boy?" His eyes landed on Ty and the smaller man leaned back, a look of scorn drawing his lips back from his teeth. But he stayed silent.

Louis looked around and watched as Bridget raised her hand. She was sitting cross-legged on her desk, shoes lost somewhere beneath the mess of her cubicle.

"Doesn't the VP upstairs have a portable stereo in his office? Maybe we can pick up a radio signal."

Antonio smiled as he snapped his fingers and pointed at her.

"Great idea," he said happily, even as Ty was interrupting.

"And how do you intend to power the radio, genius? The electricity's out. You gonna blow on it?" His voice was wry, and his smile cocky.

She shot him a withering glance, blue hair dark red in the glow of the emergency lights. "I'll leave the blowing to you, Ty. The rest of us grew up in a world where batteries exist. If it's plugged in, it should be charged."

Antonio gestured toward Louis. "Okay, a few of us will head back to the front and try to figure out the lock situation. There are external cameras that should be on some sort of back up power, but are switched off. Maybe we can light those up too." He turned to Bridget.

"Can you head upstairs and check out the VP's office? Take a couple of these guys with you. Let's stay in teams of three or four. Anyone not moving from here try to consolidate our supplies and see if we have any food or water that we can use if we're stuck in here for a while. We should probably have a couple more people upstairs trying to get a signal in the lounge. Any volunteers?"

Cam stood up, and several more hands shot up from the back row. Bridget hopped off her desktop and rooted through the debris under her desk for her shoes.

Louis stood up, leaning against the wall of his cubicle. His eyes were growing tired from the red lighting, and he rubbed his neck wearily.

"We should agree on something before we start fanning out," he said, looking around the group. "Like Antonio said, we don't know what's going on out there. And we don't know what's waiting for us. A little while ago, I heard pounding coming from one of the doors. I thought it was a maintenance crew or something, but obviously it was ... someone or something else. It went away after we went upstairs, so it could have just been someone looking for a place to hide, but we need to be smart about this. We might not be able to get out, but that means no one can get in. We're safe as long as we don't open those doors. We should all agree on that."

Antonio nodded, and a murmur of approval moved through the assembled group. Louis stared at Ty, the most likely to try go it alone and fuck everyone else over, and waited until his tight lipped frown broke and he nodded once, turning away and moving back to his desk, clearly not inclined to join in any of the tasks.

"Okay, meet back up in a half hour," said Antonio.

***

Primary infection rates varied. Those who had ingested a contaminated sample infected with the primary pathogen tended toward a longer incubation period, but one that was still drastically variable, anywhere between two and twelve hours. The slow incubation in some allowed for movement of the infection. The rapid development of symptoms, delayed until the final stages of the infection, helped to slow the discovery of the disease.

Amongst those who were bitten, or infected by fluid transmission, the conversion rate was dramatically faster.

It was the worst possible combination of transmission modalities.

While the slower primary infection rate allowed for travel and the spread of the disease, unencumbered by the symptoms and indicators, the faster secondary infection rate, as spread by bites or other fluid transmittal, served as an accelerant to the dissemination of the illness.

In other words, the infection was perfectly adapted to the modern world. It could travel distances without revealing itself, and it could spread quickly and violently. It was ideally suited for a global pandemic.

It was ideally suited to destroy humanity.

***

Louis wasn't a brave man. He had always preferred avoidance to confrontation. He didn't like to put himself out there, and he couldn't stand conflict; quite simply, he didn't have an urge to be the best. At anything. He went to a middle of the road community college because he didn't want to get rejected from anything better, and he dropped out because he was afraid of failing. He drove a cheap car and lived in a cheap apartment with crummy heat and smelly carpets because he didn't want the pressure of getting a better job to earn more money to pay for anything more comfortable or prestigious. Even his sole romantic relationship--with the girl he started dating in high school--was an exercise in avoiding fear and let down.

He was a fairly cowardly man, and he knew it. He was fine with it.

Not great. Not bad. Just fine.

And that's how he liked it, because just fine was all he knew.

As he walked toward the security office, trailing Antonio and trailed by several other customer service reps from the phone division, he grew nervous. He knew that he didn't have the courage to be the guy. He wasn't going to be the man that walked outside alone, ready to brave a horde of sickos for the good of the group; he wasn't going to be the guy to prop the door open so everyone could be saved, risking life and limb for the group. He just wasn't. But if he was asked to be, it would cause a conflict between him and Antonio, and he hated conflict. So he was torn.

Louis resolved to sink into the background and participate without leading. He knew that he had taken the initiative earlier, but also knew that that was before he knew the score. He was just looking for his boss in a dark room before. Now, the stakes seemed a little higher.

He could let someone else be the hero.

Antonio stopped as they entered the entrance vestibule, turning toward the rest of them and holding his hand up, his head cocked slightly to the side. For a moment, Louis wondered at his affect, but as he got closer, he heard the sound. A dull thumping was coming from the external door to the left. Louis walked slowly to where Antonio stood, listening. The three other men behind Louis drifted to a stop behind him, one of them starting to speak but hushed quickly by the other two.

Antonio stepped slowly toward the exit door as Louis cringed internally. The sound was of something being beaten against the metal. Something both soft and hard, like a hand or a foot. The solid thunk echoed in the dark chamber, and the inconsistent beating was muffled slightly by the thick metal of the reinforced steel. Louis remembered passing through those doors when he left work. They were at least three inches thick, and had a variety of reinforcing technologies embedded inside the frame. Steel bars that extended out from the frame and magnetic locks were the mainstays, and he suspected that the mechanism of bars was at play now, since the magnetic locks would have been disengaged when the power went out.

Antonio crept forward, his ears picking up the vibrations and his heart hammering in his chest. As he approached, his hand extended involuntarily toward the handle below before he realized his reflexive mistake. If you walk through the same door every day, you get used to the feeling, he supposed.

His arm dropped slowly to his side as he leaned his head toward the metal, placing his cheek against the cold steel. Outside the door, the staccato cadence stayed true. It was a mindless, repetitive sound. It was thoughtless and clearly not motivated by urgency or conscious thought. And it was decidedly the action of a human being.

Louis watched Antonio lean into the door and blinked several times, absently fondling the cellular phone in his pocket. Suddenly, the ringer erupted in the first bar from a Journey song he loved, and which he had set on his phone in an attempt at ironic humor that he hoped no one would peg as a true love for classic rock.

Antonio's face ripped away from the door and his eyes widened. Behind Louis, one of the men from customer service started pawing at the phone which was emerging from his pocket with his hand. Louis brought the device up from his hip just as the older man from customer service was extending his hand to silence the intrusion. Louis' hand collided with the other man's sending the phone into the air and clattering back to the tile floor in an explosion of plastic and a loud, tearing electronic tweet as the volume of the ringtone increased suddenly before dying. Louis stared at the shards of his phone, stunned. Beside him, the older man shot him a withering look as Antonio froze near the door. Louis looked over slowly, recognizing the problem and cursing.

Outside, the pounding had increased.

And it was now coming from both sides of the entrance.

***

The infected were mindlessly violent. There was no explanation for their pathology or their behavior, nor was there any time to study it. As the infection rapidly took hold of large swaths of humanity, police forces and emergency responders fell in the first wave. Unable to hold back the teeming throngs of fleeing civilians, and unable to hold the line of emergency cordons hastily set up to contain those who had been infected, they were overwhelmed or overpowered. Those that refused to flee were killed.

Wherever humans lived and worked, the infection took hold. Big cities, of course, were the first to succumb to massive casualties. With high numbers and dense populations came the highest risk of exponential infection, and in such high density areas, chaos and carnage reigned supreme. Packed together under normal circumstances, held in check by the barest cloak of societal norms, ghettos in Chicago and New York and Miami and Los Angeles, neighborhoods and apartments and vast swaths of foreclosed homes and low income housing, long forgotten by a society all too willing to leave them behind, were breeding grounds for the rapid transmission of the infection.

Schools became charnel houses, and hospitals were among the first to fall, spewing forth vast numbers of the dead and infected living alike.

Office buildings and sky scrapers were incubators and death camps for the white collar workers inside. Packed interstates became feeding grounds and city streets were impassible.

In wealthy neighborhoods, the Beverly Hills and the Green Lakes, the Virginia suburbs and Cape Cod, the infection progressed, albeit slower. It knew no boundaries and moved with the flow of people.

But in a time of abject terror and lawlessness, people moved fast, no matter how wealthy they had once been.

***

Bridget didn't mind her job. In fact, she kinda thought it rocked. But she was only twenty four, and was content knowing that she had a long life of menial jobs ahead of her, so she knew she had a perspective on this place that the others lacked. Louis was a thirty-something (or at least she thought he was--he was older than she was, at least, and quite honestly, anyone over her age she lumped into the thirty-something demographic) with a live in girlfriend and bad hair, who very clearly wanted more than he had, but was afraid to admit it.

Cam was a slacker and a stoner, but good with computers. He was about her age, though, and she didn't know anyone her age that didn't know their way around the internet and all things app. It was how they had grown up. Surrounded by technology and the constant threat of obsolescence or evolution, they adapted quickly to new tech. You just couldn't afford to ever be the chick that didn't know about the new thing. Especially in this job market.

Which was why she didn't mind her job. She had three cats, a crap ton of student loans, and a whiny mother that begged her to go to law school with the same frequency that she begged for grandchildren, a husband, and for god's sake a pushup bra every once and a while.

Bridget frowned as she remembered her mother and climbed the stairs faster in response, eager to scope out the VP's office for the radio. Eager for news about what had happened. Or what was happening now.

Cam trailed behind her, and Beverly from wealth management brought up the rear, her short blond hair bouncing around the thick black frames of her designer glasses. Bridget hadn't ever really talked to Beverly, but suspected that they were two emails, crossing in the night. Her style was more thrift store casual, while Beverly appeared to shop at actual stores. She even drove a Volkswagen, Bridget had observed casually while walking to the bus stop. No, not a match made in heaven.

Bridget flashed the keychain flashlight on the last of the stairs and turned right, moving along the exterior wall and toward the bank of executive offices in the corner of the building. There were only six actual offices in the building, and they were all clustered in one corner.

Across the large room and above their heads, the red emergency lights blazed brightly, their glow just slightly weaker than they had been when the power went out. Bridget wondered as they passed beneath one of the red boxes underneath a large light fixture whether the batteries were designed for prolonged use. This was, after all, the first world. Utilities rarely remained off for long, and the theory behind the emergency lights were that they help you find your way out in an emergency. She chuckled at the last thought, keenly aware of the fact that these lights had simply illuminated the pitch black interior of the windowless crypt of an office. There was, as of now, no way out.

The smile quickly faded when she realized that those lights were the only thing that stood between them and pitch blackness inside the large building.

She hoped that the lights had been designed with longevity in mind.

Behind her, Cam whispered softly.

"You know which is his?" he asked, and she slowed to allow him to come even with her.

She remembered well, having been selected to deliver a presentation for him and several board members on electronic mail responses.

"Yeah, I know where it is. Just stay with me, okay? I don't want to lose you up here. It'd take me all night to find another sulky dope with a Justin Bieber hair cut and a teenager's sense of fashion." Her voice was serious, but it dripped with sarcasm. Cam grunted once but exhaled in a short laugh.

"Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere. Not like I could if I wanted to, but ..." He trailed off, muttering something under his breath. Behind him, Bridget could hear Beverly breathing heavily, her anxiety becoming apparent.

They approached the office suite carefully, opening the glass doors into the reception area and moving to the right of the large desk. A large computer monitor faced away from the double doors and toward where the receptionist typically sat. The bank's logo faced the doors, gleaming in well-polished corporate perfection. A neatly arranged stack of two month old magazines sat on a glass-top table next to a large leather sofa, a large--likely fake--palm tree adorned the corner behind the sofa. One large emergency light lit the room, flooding down from a sconce above the center of the door and reflecting from the gleaming corporate logo in an off-putting semblance of blood.

"So his office is through here," Bridget said softly, unconsciously lowering her voice as if she feared getting caught by the boss. She recognized her anxiety and spoke louder as she turned to Cam and Beverly. "You guys want to hang out here and I'll pop in?"

Even in the low light she could see Cam's distorted face as he shook his head. "You crazy? This shit is spooky enough as it is, and we don't need to start with the horror movie crap. Next thing I know, you'll be promising to 'be right back' and suggesting we split up into teams of one and go into the freezer..."

"The building doesn't have a freezer," she managed to insert, smiling.

" ... and we'll be picking pieces of each other from the rusty tools of the crazy mutants or homicidal plague-infected whack-jobs..."

"And I don't think a team can have just one person," she began, as he continued to rail. Her amusement ended suddenly as Beverly gasped quickly and backed away from the door, shooting her hand into Cam, who spoke several more agitated words before Bridget grabbed his shirt and shook it softly.

She had heard it too.

Beverly slipped behind them both, moving behind the counter and crouching below the desk. Bridget grunted once in derision, moving toward the door as Cam stayed frozen near the front of the desk.

She heard it again. The sound of something skittering across a smooth floor, as if being dragged or kicked repeatedly. In the low light, struggling to discern movement against the erratically bright spot lights and the pockets of shadow, she peered into the darkness, leaning out from the open glass doorway into the hall.

It was quiet, but for a dull, steady pounding that reverberated up the stairwell from downstairs. It was a sound she assumed to be the team at the front, trying to open the door into the security room. Her breath was coming more rapidly, and she felt her hand shake slightly as she brushed her short hair back from her face. She fought the sudden urge that stirred beneath her belt, cursing herself for not using the toilet before coming upstairs. The unbidden, uncomfortable tightness made her shift her weight.

Behind her, Cam whispered, his voice raspy and dry.

"Do you see anything?"

She shook her head slightly, eyes unblinkingly focused on the shadows across the room. They swam in front of her as the bright light from the spotlights began to spot her vision, and she blinked despite her best efforts.

She was totally unprepared when the large hand clasped her arm and dragged her into the darkness.

***

Within twelve hours of the first infection, cities across the nation were burning.

Millions had been infected, and millions more were dead.

Power outages and fires complicated what few relief efforts and counter attacks could be organized and arranged, and national guard units, already overwhelmingly short-staffed due to the constant rotations overseas, were hastily deployed from safe holds outside major urban centers. In some cases, the personnel carriers rolled into empty, burning neighborhoods.

In other cases, they rolled into terror. Bodies crushed against one another, teeming in the streets, hands outstretched, blood running in rivers.

They couldn't respond to this.

No one could respond to this.

***

"There has to be an auxiliary power source in here, right? These security booths are set up for power failures and contingencies. They have to have a way to watch the cameras when the power is cut. It's a bank for God's sake."

The sound of incessant pounding on the thick doors was loud in the small space, and Antonio's voice reflected the increasing fear of those inside.

Louis ran his hand over the door latch, registering that it was locked but wondering again at the need. It would only need to be locked if the guard thought that there was something inside that needed to be protected or secured. Or, it occurred to Louis, if the guard was trying to protect them from themselves.

"The bank couldn't possibly have a security system that locked its employees in automatically, could it? I mean, that's a damn lawsuit waiting to happen."

He hadn't intended to speak out loud, but he was glad he had done so when Antonio nodded and picked up the thought.

"So someone locked us in on purpose, then left? That doesn't make sense. I buy that we were locked in, but where is the guard? Where's Voj for that matter? This shit doesn't make sense."

As Antonio spoke, the others filtered out from behind the security booth, defeated in their search for an auxiliary power switch or a way in to the locked booth.

"Okay, that leaves the basement." Antonio's sentence was met with silence. From Louis' perspective, it was a silence of disbelief and abject fear. Possibly mixed with a "this dude is crazy" vibe.

"And...what does that get us exactly?"

Antonio spoke loudly to be heard over the incessant pounding, which seemed to punctuate the question asked by the other man from customer service, whose large frame was now showing signs of nervous sweat soaking through his cheap, no-iron shirt.

"The only way to reset the main power is the breaker, and the breaker is in the basement," he said confidently, as if the aggressive pounding outside didn't exist

"Yeah, but..." Louis drew out the vowel in 'but' for emphasis, "Doesn't the power control the magnetic locks on the doors? If the power is reset, how do we know it won't shoot these doors open and let whoever is outside in?"

Antonio frowned before responding, tempering his voice with the patience he learned in the Army after two tours in Iraq.

"I don't think resetting the power will open the doors. The most it could do is release the magnetic locks, and those locks aren't on now--and Stan, if we ever want to option of leaving this place, we are going to need to open the doors."

He looked pointedly at the older man, eyes hard. Louis swallowed the objection he was going to make and let Stan take the lead.

"Well I'm not hanging out here so that whoever is on the other side of that door can come in and find me with a welcome banner stapled to my pasty white ass. I'll wait with the others while you scout the basement with your friend," as he finished, he nodded toward Louis, who did a double take as he realized Stan was talking about him and that he had just been fingered to descend into the building's large, dark basement with Antonio.

Louis cursed under his breath, feeling an unbidden shiver of fear ripple up his spine. Not cool, Stan.

Before Antonio could answer, Stan turned on his heel and into the darkness of the cubicles, where the red emergency lights were starting to dim. The other men from the section drifted along, like flotsam caught in the wake of a boat, following the older man.

The pounding from outside had grown more insistent, and Louis shivered involuntarily as he imagined the repeated blows of hands and fists and feet, the sickness and dementia with which the individuals had to be infected to be acting in such a manner. Beside him, Antonio's gaze drifted into space momentarily, and he wondered what the larger man was thinking.

"You don't have to go with me," Antonio said in a soft whisper, as if uttering an afterthought to a conversation he had been having with himself.

Louis knew this. And Louis didn't want to go.

The rational part of his brain told him that the basement was just as safe as the main building--that the bank was locked down and impenetrable from outside. That the basement was simply one more floor in a large, windowless building, and that it would have no more or less light than the rest of this absurd place.

The irrational part of his brain said that the basement was full of evil clowns, scorpions, monsters that only ate human testicles, and a mariachi band playing a looped version of the Macarena. In other words, a scary damn place.

"I know, but ..."

But what?

He had no reason to go. Other than the fact that Stan had singled him out, and he'd look like a huge dick if he bailed. But other than that, no reason at all. After all, he wasn't that guy. Yet a part of him wanted to find the answer, and be a part of the solution. He respected that part of himself. He was afraid; he was a coward, but today, he was going to go to the basement because he felt like it. Not because he had to, or because anyone else thought he should.

"...you shouldn't go alone, and I'm curious. I want to see what's happening here, and we can't do that without power. Besides, we're not going to last long in here without food."

Louis' voice was soft under the powerful echoes of the doors shaking in their housings, and Antonio barely caught the acknowledgement. When he had processed Louis' halting response, he looked up, breaking his thousand yard stare and locking eyes with a man he had too quickly dismissed as cowardly. He was happy to have the company, although unconvinced of the value of the man in case of conflict. Either way, he smiled widely at Louis as he turned away from the shuddering doors.

"Okay then, let's do it. I think I saw a small flashlight on someone's desk when we were walking up here. Let's grab it and get this shit over with." He clapped Louis on the shoulder and strode past with purpose.

Louis followed, glad that Antonio couldn't see his legs shaking in the dim light.

***

The rural areas fared somewhat better. With the advantage of distance from urban centers, and lower populations, combined with a much lower pass-through rate of individuals from outside their geographic areas, towns and smaller cities had a much higher success rate in quelling infection.

Trauma units had warnings, and barricades could be effective. Roadblocks and quarantine measures could be implemented and enforced. Citizens could arm themselves. Rules could be formulated and security maintained.

But none were safe for long.

In a society as transient and fluid as America, there were always connections.

There were always methods for an infection to spread.

And spread it did.

***

Bridget struggled briefly before a soft whisper brought her up short.

"Shhh! Quiet! There's something over there, against the wall near the back cubes."

It was Ty, and his cold hand shook slightly with a clammy palsy. She grimaced at the thought of him touching her and tore her head away, rubbing her neck and staring in the direction he had pointed. What the hell was he doing up here, anyway?

Inside the office, Cam lowered his voice to a frantic whisper.

"Bridget? What the hell? Where'd you go?" He sounded young and afraid.

She waved her hand in front of the door and gestured to him and Beverly, who had fearfully crept from behind the large secretary's desk and now huddled behind Cam's slender, skinny-jean wearing form. Bridget considered guffawing at the irony--if Cam was the only remaining paragon of manly heroics left to cling to, the world was truly in trouble.

"Come out," she whispered without turning her head. From the corner of her eye, she saw him peer out, his head protruding from the office doorway, making a dark blotch against the backlight of the emergency lamps.

"Look!" said Ty, voice creeping up several panicked octaves. Bridget could feel him slinking back against the wall. "What the hell is that? Is that a person?"

Bridget's eyes moved to where his shaking hand pointed, focusing on the object of his fear and squinting hard.

Suddenly, everything happened at once. An ear-splitting scream erupted from the Volkswagen-driving debutante cowering behind the techie nerd, and, as the techie nerd grunted and cursed once, the small woman nearly plowing him down in a fright-induced tumble searching for the stairwell. As she tried to run past Bridget, her foot caught in the cheap carpet, and she tumbled forward, her outstretched hands catching Bridget in the chest and forcing her back against the wall and against Ty, whose own feet tangled with Bridget's. The three tumbled to the floor in a cacophony of bodies and curses and flailing limbs.

As they fell, she heard Cam's startled exclamation.

"What the hell ...? Is that ...?"

Then, the quickening steps of the scrawny man as he leapt over the tangled bodies and toward the stairs. She heard him stumble once before disappearing down the wide stairs.

Bridget thrashed underneath the pile as Beverly screamed again, panicked now more than ever as she imagined the form across the room bearing down on them. Beverly's eyes were wild and her brain was racing as she pushed herself off the pile and sprinted down the hallway between the cubicles and the wall, right hand staying in contact with the wall, left held anxiously in front of her. She heard the movement of the others behind her, and an urgent whisper--just short of an actual yell--came from Bridget. Ignoring them, she pressed forward, eager to find the stairwell.

She should never have come upstairs. It was foolish, really. Just an attempt at impressing Ty, and convincing him to finally make their relationship public. Tossing her short hair in irritation, she wiped a tear from her face, knowing that as she did so, she was streaking her makeup. The bastard, she though, suppressing a sniffle and squinting into the dark--the stairwell should be here somewhere--he thought he could screw her and ignore her. Four times in the utility closet, and he thought he was a fucking god. She got more excited and angry as she thought about it, her breath starting to slow as she focused on Ty.

Suddenly, she stopped moving, freezing in place. One hand rested on a fire extinguisher fastened to the wall on her right side; the other hovered in mid-air next to her.

Something was moving in front of her.

Beverly looked around frantically, searching for the stairs in frustration. She should have reached them by now. They weren't that far away! Her hand clenched on the red metal and she shivered, listening for sounds of approach.

Wait, she thought. Her right hand was on the wall.

Shit.

She had run the wrong way.

In her confusion, she had run toward the sound, not away. The stairs were behind her.

Merely feet away, a long scraping sound--as if a chair had been dragged on a linoleum floor.

Her eyes scanned the murky darkness. The red lights provided enough illumination to outline shapes but too much to allow night vision to adapt. Everything was blurry and tinged in red from the slowly dying security lights. Their dull gleam was slowly fading as their batteries were depleted, never having been intended for prolonged use.

She started to shake in fear as she slowly stepped back, still unable to focus on any shapes or sounds.

The unwelcome sound broke the silence again, this time closer.

She stumbled briefly as her foot caught against the wall, her shoe catching on the thick rubber of a cord protector that ran between the wall and a cubicle. The rubber jerked, pulling the cord inside slightly--but enough to jiggle a small lamp on the adjoining desk.

The sound sped up, and an amorphous shape, backlit by a weakened emergency light against the far wall, took form as a head emerged suddenly from the cubicle on her left side, like a body breaching the surface of the ocean.

Just feet from her left arm.

She screamed once, then jerked back as two arms snaked out of the cubicle, waving in the dark, hands grasping. A hollow, rasping breath exhaled from the faceless head, a waft of sick-smelling air pressing into her nostrils as she turned away.

The breath changed to a curious, aggressive groan and, somehow, two fingers caught her shirt as she turned, pulling on the fabric with a surreal strength. She was thrown off balance, and her ankle twisted awkwardly, sending her tumbling against the cubicle.

The fingers found flesh, squeezing her upper arm in a vise and pulling her further forward as her injured leg failed to support her weight and she collapsed. She flailed and screamed again as the head squirmed toward her arm, breath hot against her shoulder and neck.

In a last superhuman effort, she managed to pull her neck away from the attacker's head, but her arm stayed trapped by the pincer-like grip. As she shook her shoulder in abject terror, the head adjusted its course and she screamed in sharp and mind-blackening pain as needles of searing hot agony burned into her bicep. Even as her brain registered the injury, her body was jolted into reflexive action, tearing at the point of contact with animalistic fervor.

The mouth pulled up on her arm as she pulled away, and she watched in horror as tendrils of her own flesh were pulled up with a massive chunk of muscle and skin. Blood spurted from the wound, and she felt the warmth of the thick liquid run down her arm. While thin lines of tendon still connected the flesh with her arm, she pulled one last time, and the fingers attached to her arm loosened their grip enough to free her damaged limb. She stumbled back, and her screams of pain drowned the slurping and contented moans filtering up from within the near cubicle. Inside the small confines of this former office space, droplets of blood were flung against small calendars with kittens frolicking playfully in spring mornings. Pieces of flesh dropped unnoticed on a carefully cleaned keyboard and a brand new flat screen monitor. Hands, now drenched in human blood, rubbed against a carpeted wall, knocking small thumbtacks to the floor and releasing the years-old memorandum that had been installed there, warning users against using their work time for personal matters.

Beverly's eyes went dark, the pain shooting through her arm and into her shoulder. Her vision blurred before returning, and in the recesses of her brain, a voice shouted at her to flee. Tottering on her now wounded leg, and trying to quell the blood pouring from the jagged, deep wound in her arm, she stumbled away, leaving behind her the sickening sound of raw flesh being consumed by a human being and vaguely, even through her pain and confusion and terror, wondering what the hell had just happened.

She careened down the hallway, blood making a trail behind her, soaking into the old, musty industrial grade carpet, creating stains that would never be cleaned in a building that would never again be used.

Bridget blinked twice as she saw Beverly staggering back, having been drawn, despite her better judgment, to the screams. She wasn't someone who often thought of others, but the woman's screams--the bloodcurdling pain--had torn her back from the stairwell, and she was cautiously moving along the wall toward the direction in which Beverly had run.

She moved faster until she intercepted the taller woman, whose blood-soaked, limping form collapsed when she heard Bridget's voice.

"What the hell...Oh dear Christ, what the fuck happened to you?" Bridget's hand hovered above the wound but kept clear. She had always been afraid of blood, and the site of the weeping, bloody ruin was enough to make her throw up a small amount of her horrible dinner right into her mouth. Grimacing, she swallowed and grabbed Beverly's limp form by the belt.

Behind the two women, a chair toppled over and the sound of a thick tumble against a cubicle wall moved them forward toward the stairs.

"I don't ..." Beverly started, then took a ragged breath. "I don't know."

***

Amidst the carnage and the chaos, there were stunning feats of courage and survival. While no one could have ever anticipated such an event, the resiliency and selflessness of some brave souls would provide the foundation for the continuation, in some small way, of the human race.

There were those who reacted quickly, and took charge. The exhausted nurses at a hospital maternity ward who gathered the helpless infants and spirited them away to a nearby safe house, leaving them in the care of survivors, and then walked away into the falling night, knowing that they had been exposed to the infection. The lonely police chief in a small town outside of Anaheim, whose entire department was annihilated by a shambling, enormous horde at a roadblock, who deputized an entire town, opening the weapons lockers to the citizenry and forming a stronger resistance in the face of overwhelming odds.

The businessman in a rental car, who stopped on a ruined interstate long enough to fight off two creatures with a briefcase, saving a young woman and her child.

The group of teenagers, armed only with baseball bats, that left the safety of their locked-down school to rescue an elderly couple trapped in a disabled car.

The national guard troops that drove into city centers, knowing that they might not leave.

Thousands of people that stood up to terror and death at a time when many were hunkering down. Thousands of heroes who had been normal people merely hours before.

***

The flashlight was a cheap, Chinese-made thing that simply flipped two prongs out and plugged into an outlet. Its indicator light shone bright green when Antonio picked it up, and a weak but consistent beam of light illuminated the floor in front of them.

"Looks decent. Ready?" His voice was tight, but confident. Louis felt much less sure of himself--naked in front of his class on a cold day, less sure. But he nodded, nonetheless.

"Okay then," Antonio was quick to smile, but he recognized the fear in Louis' eyes. "Let's get this over with so we can go home."

Louis nodded briefly and fumbled with the small pen light one of the other reps had donated to their cause when they went back to the group. It was the only other flashlight they could find, and he was none too satisfied with it as a primary torch. But it was what it was, and he wasn't complaining. He had bigger things to worry about.

They walked briskly through the narrow aisles, passing hundreds of cubicles adorned with the small amount of personal flair permitted by the corporate overlords. Here a graduation tassel, there a picture. One desk even held a small lava lamp, whose cord was conspicuously dangled from a thumb tack to prove it wasn't plugged in to company power--a violation of rules.

If there was a huge disease out there, and if people really were dying or stumbling around like idiots, or even attacking other people, maybe it was for the better. Maybe humanity was hitting that big old "reset" button in the sky. Maybe the world was ready to shake the dust of this ridiculous species off its back and move forward. It was worth considering.

Then he realized what that meant. No more movie nights. No more hamburgers or french fries. No more airplane rides or telephones or electricity or jacuzzi tubs or micro-brewed beer.

Oh god, the beer.

He shivered involuntarily as they passed the last cubicle and stood underneath the blood-like glare of an emergency light, the power considerably weaker than merely an hour ago.

The door to the basement was inconspicuous, and unmarked but for a small sign that read "Restricted Access: Basement Stairs" in small font next to the handle. Louis pointed his penlight at the sign, then scanned the corridor between the cubes on his right and left.

"I don't know where the panel would be, but it should be obvious--a large junction box with a series of thick tubes running from it. You know what I'm talking about?"

Louis nodded as Antonio spoke, his large hand on the door handle.

"Yeah, my girlfriend's always tripping the breakers at home with the hair dryer," he said quietly, surprised at his lack of overwhelming concern for her. They had been together for a long time, but something had always kept him from asking her to marry him.

Antonio's voice broke through his thoughts, snapping his head forward.

"Let's go," said the larger man, opening the door and walking into the cavernous stairwell.

Louis followed closely, having no wish to remain alone in the dark with a mere penlight as his valiant defender. The stairwell was an emergency exit from the second floor, and was made entirely of concrete and cement. On the right hand side, a small plaque was installed for the mentally challenged. An arrow pointed down, to the basement, and up for the second floor. Louis chuckled softly, even as his heart started to pound against the inside of his chest.

Antonio stepped briskly down, leaning over the red-painted railing and peering over the side of the stairs to make sure no one was below.

Louis jumped suddenly as the door behind them slammed shut with a loud metallic clang. He cocked his head slightly, listening. He could have sworn he heard a scream echo through the doorway right before it shut.

"Hey, Antonio, I ..."

"Don't worry man, we got this. Come on." He was already at the landing, and Louis jogged down the first flight to see him standing at the door to the basement.

In the stairwell above them, one of the large red emergency lights that had been casting a wan, but serviceable, light on the stairs finally flickered and died. The remaining light cast long shadows in the lonely stairwell, and Louis flew down the last flight until he stood next to Antonio, who leaned against the door with his head cocked, listening for signs of movement. Antonio had always been cautious, and two years spent clearing houses in Baghdad during the early days of the Iraq War had taught him the value of patience--and of luck.

"Listen, I thought I heard something up there, right before the door closed," Louis whispered, his voice brought to lower, dulcet tones by the fear he felt in this enclosed space.

Antonio gave him an understanding look as he placed his hand on the door handle, preparing to enter the basement. He had seen this look on the faces of his men. He knew fear, and he knew that the only antidote to a healthy dose of understandable fear was unreasonable rationality. He moderated his tone and spoke slowly and softly, willing the smaller man to calm himself.

"I know, I'm hearing shit too. This is freaky crap, and we're wading hip deep in it. But when we get the power reset, we can find out what's going on and maybe even get out of here. It's almost over." He even flashed a reassuring smile.

Louis shook his head, submitting briefly to the thought that he might indeed have imagined the noise. He stared at the floor as he heard the door handle creak slowly against the frame as Antonio began to push slowly against the heavy metal door.

As the door opened, Louis' eyes were drawn to a small, raggedly torn scrap of paper laying discarded near the door frame, several inches from Antonio's foot. As the larger man pressed forward through the door silently, flashlight raised and pointed ahead into the murky, inky darkness of the basement, Louis snatched the paper up curiously and followed.

Antonio had thrown the deadbolt from the inside, preventing the door from shutting all the way, in case it had some manner of auto-locking mechanism. As the bolt caught against the frame of the door, Louis stopped walking, stunned by the absolute darkness. He fumbled momentarily for the button that would activate his meager light source, even as he watched the stronger beam of Antonio's light move slowly into the cavernous space.

In the darkness that enveloped him, the sounds of the underground room were eerie and unnerving. A slow drip somewhere behind him. A quiet rattle somewhere in the distance. The shuffle of Antonio's feet ahead of him.

A small breeze pushed past his neck, as if of something moving nearby, and he flailed suddenly, the hair on his arms standing at attention as he pressed the button on the penlight.

His light sputtered to life, and he panned it quickly around, watching the beam reflect off pipes suspended from the low ceiling, and large supporting walls packed with cables and telephone lines extending into the distance. Antonio's light was disappearing around the corner of one of those walls and it stopped momentarily to let him catch up.

Louis jogged to where the man stood, eyes scanning the room to the extent allowed by the small light.

"Sorry, I was ..." Then Louis remembered the small piece of paper, still clenched tightly in his now sweaty palm. He quickly opened his hand and looked down at the paper, even as he heard Antonio walk forward. Walking carefully, one eye on the larger man and one on the paper, he trained his light on the scrap.

Went to basement. Back in 5.

That was odd, he thought. Why would someone in the basement leave a note at the door telling people they were going there?

Unless someone else had found that note, and went looking for that person in the basement and had dropped the note when they found them ...

Someone like Voj.

Shit.

As he looked up, ready to speak, everything happened at once.

"Found it!" exclaimed Antonio, then cursed loudly as his light flickered and died. A sudden flurry of activity exploded in the enclosed space as Antonio started slamming his open palm against the flashlight in his hand, while Louis struggled to find words for what he had discovered.

As the first word left his mouth, Antonio's light flickered on, this time pointed not to the ground or in front of him, but toward his own face. Louis watched as he blinked and averted his eyes, temporarily blinded by the light, and the beam drifted over his shoulder, illuminating the distorted, red-eyed face of a massive man in a security guard's uniform. Blood streaked his cheeks, and his reddened eyes glowed malevolently in the momentary bright light.

Even as Antonio moved his face back from the glare of the light, the larger man struck, his head lashing forward, teeth gleaming in the dull glow of the cheap Chinese light as they slashed into the exposed neck. His eyes, closed against the light, now opened wide in pain and Louis watched, seemingly in slow motion, as Antonio's mouth opened in a soundless scream, and blood flowed freely from underneath the mouth now attached to his neck. Then, the flashlight fell from Antonio's hand, flickering off again as it slammed into the concrete ground.

Louis' hand trembled on the small pen light, and his voice died on his lips. He tried to move. He tried to speak. His arms and legs were frozen, and his throat was closing slowly, immobilizing his vocal cords. He tried to raise the light, to give Antonio--to give his friend--some small amount of assistance.

But he couldn't. Instead, he stood helplessly, thumb slowly pressing the button on the light that deactivated the bulb, plunging the room into total darkness.

In the pitch black, he heard the thrashing and the coughing scream of pain. He heard bodies moving against one another, and he felt the impact of two large men crashing against the ground. A muted scream came from one of them--Antonio, he imagined--and then a tearing gurgle. Detached, he noted it was the type of sound he made when he gargled at night. Wet, and bubbling.

He couldn't move.

He wanted to help, but he couldn't.

Then he realized why.

He wasn't that guy. Never had been.

He was the wrong guy to go into a dark basement with. He wasn't up to the task. He cared about one person: himself.

Even amid the scuffling attack, which had now lessened from a wrestling match to what sounded like a scraping or even a muffled humming, he realized he was numb from the shock of what he had seen. But he managed to back up slowly, eyes drawn to the faint line of red light shooting through the slightly opened door. Even in his fear and bemused confusion, he was careful not to place his body between the light and the scene in front of him, careful not to make himself a target.

Antonio had been foolish. He had been too sure of himself, too willing to work for the solution with too little information.

But you couldn't find the solution without knowing the cause.

And now he had found the cause. Or rather, the cause had found him.

In the darkness, Tiny moved.

Or maybe Antonio, although Louis doubted that.

A sound like someone sloshing through spilled paint or a puddle of water cut through the silence, and the movement of feet came toward him.

He turned, finally, and ran forward, nearly tripping as he reached ahead and pulled the door back as quickly as he could, sprinting through the opening and up the stairs. His breath came in short bursts, his chest thumping in near panic.

Suddenly, he skidded to a halt.

The door.

The deadbolt was thrown, keeping it propped open. Tiny had been trapped in there for some reason, maybe not knowing where the door was, maybe not knowing how to open it. But Louis and Antonio had fixed both of those problems.

He stood on the landing between the basement and the first floor, noticing for the first time the very faint sprinkling of dark liquid near the far side of the stairs, leading up from the basement past the landing.

Blood.

Tiny wasn't alone.

Louis was frozen, panic overtaking his urge to flee.

There were more of these ... people. Someone had found that note in guard booth. Someone had come down here.

And someone had bled for the effort.

Louis held his breath as the door moved slightly, as if something heavy had fallen against it. The door opened into the basement, so perhaps the thing inside couldn't figure out how to pull it. Maybe it was still trapped.

A rasping sigh, wet with fluid and loud in the echoing space, ripped through the silence of the stairwell. Above Louis' head, the final red emergency light flickered once, plunging the stairwell into a flood of darkness before reigniting in a sputtering staccato. His head whipped around furiously until the light came back, and his eyes flashed back to the basement as a gentle creak of metal against metal sounded in the confined space. Below him, the door swung open, swinging back slowly, like a mouth savoring the first bite, darkness inside the basement hiding the beast within.

He fled. Feet furiously pounding against the cement and steel stairwell, heart racing. His mind was a scattering of images and sounds.

A head frozen in time above the shoulder of Antonio. Antonio's triumphant smile as his flashlight illuminated the threat unseen behind him. The blood and the tearing.

His own cowardice.

He blinked back a single tear as he flew into the doorway to the first floor, yanking back the heavy metal and flying through the doorway.

He leaned back against the door, hearing the metal click satisfyingly into the frame, and gulping air into his lungs.

That's when he heard the screaming.

***

It was stunning how quickly society seemed to disappear.

Under throngs of teeming, bloody bodies, amid fires and screams and the popping of gunfire and explosions, the world seemed to ignite.

On a normal day, in a normal world, it is easy to lose sight of how tenuous everything really is. It has been said that any society is merely a few missed meals from revolution.

What about when the society is the meal?

When the power goes out and men with guns are no longer a phone call away, to whom do you trust your security?

Social norms and societal security are constructs of a larger truth: that people live within the rules and operating instructions of other people, out of a knowing sense of vested self interest.

But the system in which society exists is not natural, and it is far from infallible. In fact, it can fall within just twelve hours.

And it did.

The world lost many people on that day. But it lost many other things as well.

Hot showers and hot meals.

Cold beer and iced tea.

Roads, bridges, telephones.

Police.

Fire departments.

Airplanes.

Safety.

Hope.

When that curtain of illusory safety is pulled back by throngs of the living dead, the world becomes a much more serious place. A place inhabited by the walking dead, where the the living are an endangered species.

***

Bridget started to worry when the emergency lights began to flicker out, one by one, on the bottom floor. She checked her watch, noting absently that it was nearing dawn. Her fingers were sticky with blood and she drew several more tissues from a generic brand box on someone's desk.

Behind her, Beverly had stopped crying, and now drew ragged, pained breaths. The small crowd was silent, sitting in a ragged ring around the injured woman, eyes darting nervously around the cavernous space, ears perked for any sign of movement or disturbance.

Ty lay down on his desk, eyes staring into the distance, shaking slightly.

Bridget had tried to ask him what he was doing upstairs, why he had come up to join them. But one look at Beverly had sent him into his current state, and none of the others had any idea. They hadn't noticed him leave, as they huddled anxiously in the cubicles, waiting for news or salvation.

Someone's breath caught loudly as another light flickered and died, plunging the entire northeast corner of the building into darkness. Bridget cursed under her breath and stopped scrubbing her hands ineffectually. The blood had caked into the small grooves in her skin, and underneath her fingernails, and she knew it was a losing battle. But she'd be damned if she was going to risk the bathrooms.

"Should we go check on them," asked a quavering woman's voice from a cubicle near the end, referring to Antonio and Louis.

A quiet guffaw cut through the oppressive silence, one of the men who had gone to the front door earlier. Someone else spoke sharply, the words indeterminate, and the man fell silent.

No one answered the question.

Bridget looked at Cam, whose skinny form was the only one caring for Beverly as she lay on the floor between two cubes, skin pallid and cold, breath shivering and shaking her frame. Her eyes were staring into the distance of the cavernous ceiling and Bridget swallowed a sigh.

To die in this building. There couldn't be a fate much worse than that in life.

From across the vast empty floor, the sudden sound of something falling heavily against the ground near the stairwell split the silence, and Bridget heard several loud gasps. Bodies moved behind her in nervous agitation, even as a loud, droning sigh breathed out from Beverly.

It had been her last.

Cam reached down to check her pulse, as two of the men from customer relations moved tentatively toward the noise, stopping merely feet away from the group. The lights were failing fast, and as another sound filtered through the echoing space--this one from closer to the group, near the main entrance--another red light died.

The space was nearly completely dark, now, with only three lights remaining. Two were on the wall nearest the stairwell to the basement, while the last remaining light glared like a single red eye, staring at the huddled employees from above the main entrance.

"Do you see anything?" Cam said softly from behind her.

"Is she alive?" Bridget said quietly, eyes staying locked forward, searching for the noise.

He waited several seconds before answering.

"No."

Bridget nodded, unsure of how to deal with the death. Unconsciously, she began scrubbing her hands again before sticking them firmly into her pockets. She wondered whether she'd ever get to wash her clothes again. Surely, the blood would remain.

"We should move the body, we don't know if she ..."

The rest of her sentence was drowned out by the loud clanging of a slammed door, and a body flew out from the basement doors, pressing itself against the door as it shut again.

Almost simultaneously, her ears rang with a scream of pain as Cam erupted in a blood-curdling yell. She flew from the desk top and away from his scream of pain, staring at the site of Beverly's pale face latched on to Cam's cheek. Even as he screamed and pummeled her with his fists, the skin of his face peeled slowly away from his jaw, and Bridget felt bile slam into the back of her teeth as his teeth showed through the jagged tear.

From across the room, someone yelled loudly, their voice a frantic plea for help.

And that's when things got interesting.

Unknown to the people inside the large, windowless building, the power in the building had been cut after a large tractor trailer, traveling at nearly ninety miles per hour at the time of the impact, had sheered a power coupling in half four blocks away. The resulting impact severed the power feed to the building, and the large grid within which the building was situated.

However, the massive hospital one block away was a priority for the local government. In an admirable feat of governmental responsiveness, utility crews were dispatched--even during the initial confusing hours of the outbreak--to bring the hospital, and the rest of its grid, back online. Those crews had worked diligently, suspended high above the city streets in several different vehicles, to restore power and give the doctors and nurses of Harbor Island General the ability to help as many people as they could.

Tragically, these brave workers--many of who would ultimately perish from thirst or starvation suspended above the city streets--worked long after the results of their labor were in vain.

Harbor Island General was overrun merely two hours into the epidemic.

But the power was restored four hours later.

Precisely at the time that Beverly heard Cam scream.

Precisely at the time that Louis appeared from the basement below.

As the last two red emergency lights began to wane, and as Louis called across the cavernous space, the fluorescent lights far above the heads of the assembled night shift began to flicker. Simultaneously, five hundred computer hard drives began to hum within their housings, and five hundred monitors showed the static, monochromatic emblem of the installed operating systems. Bathroom lights illuminated empty stalls. Air conditioning systems began to spool up. A radio that had been playing softly on someone's desk before the outage hissed its static rage. A clock on the wall far above their heads illuminated large red numbers.

And the outer doors, manually armed on a separate circuit but hardwired to reset when power had been restored, clicked softly in their housings. Steel beams retracted from the heavy frames and a horn blasted once, from inside the building. Outside the building, massive external floodlights--also programmed to automatically illuminate the entrances to the large building--shone on hundreds of assembled bodies, churning against the doors, and each other.

Inside the building, near the bottom of the large flight of stairs leading to the second floor, the man who used to be Rajesh pushed his broken, bloody frame up slowly from the dirty carpet. His dead eyes moved slowly in their sockets, and he fumbled to right himself on an awkwardly angled leg.

Had Rajesh been alive, he would have screamed in dire agony, as the shattered leg crunched with the effort. Shards of bone scraped against the carpet, catching in the weave as he slid forward on his two hands and one leg, bent over himself as if stooped with great age.

He didn't know pain.

But he knew hunger.

Across the room, shouts drew his attention briefly. His nose sniffed at the air, and his ears rang with the sound of the screams. But he was motivated by immediacy, and the sounds that drew him now were those funneling through the doors so close at hand.

Had Rajesh been alive, his eyes would have read the words above the doors.

Exit.

He slid forward slowly, singular of purpose.

Had Rajesh been alive, he would have appreciated the simplicity of the locking mechanism.

He leaned forward, his crippled body weight pressing the bar of metal back into the door, and releasing the final latch from inside the building. The door opened slightly, a blast of putrid air wafting inside.

Rajesh stopped, knowing that no food called from this direction. He turned, moving toward the screams.

And as fingers found the space between the door and the wall and pulled the heavy door outward, his people followed along with him, the bright lights within the building now guiding their way.

***

They were motivated by food. That was what drove them forward. It is what moved their stiffened limbs and bloodless faces and forced their jaws together reflexively, in spasms of hunger and desire.

Although they couldn't see as well as the living, their other senses appeared to be unaffected by the infection, and their hearing seemed to have improved--possibly as an effect of their ear canals becoming more rigid in death.

They moved slowly, but they were unrelenting and implacable.

They were not deterred by exhaustion or fear. They could not be reasoned with, and they could not be deterred.

***

Louis blinked in the brightness, eyes flashing to the ground in pain before adjusting to the new-found illumination. A relieved breath caught in his chest as he briefly allowed himself the joy of hope; the satisfaction of a brief certitude that life had not irrevocably changed.

Behind him, fists hammered on the door, and he yelled in surprise, falling forward and catching himself. He ran, making toward the assembled group he could now see milling head and shoulders above the cubicles.

As he dodged chairs and desks running toward his colleagues, he noticed the disarray. Two men were struggling with a third person while the rest huddled around something on the floor. As he approached, and cleared the last obstacle, his words of warning froze in his mouth.

They were here, too.

Beverly thrashed on the floor, bloody teeth gnashing in vain as she tried to escape from the power cords tied tightly around her hands and feet. The two men stood up slowly and backed away, eyes wide.

In the cubicle next to her, Cam's eyes were wide open, and staring at the ceiling, his mouth torn open from the cheek and face covered in blood and spittle. A large, motherly woman cradled his head in her lap as a widening pool of blood stained the carpet beneath her.

Bridget's hand grabbed his arm in a vise-like grip, and his eyes snapped back to her face, dirty and smudged, as if someone had painted dark red war paint underneath her eyes. Eyes that had been staring toward the front of the building, watching what no one else had yet seen.

"What did you do?" she asked quietly, even as the others began to yell. Feet churned against the carpet as the assembled workers began to run through the narrow corridors.

"I ... we couldn't ..."

There was no answer. None that he could give.

None that he could give, and remain a man.

Then, he saw what she was looking at and realized why she had asked the question.

And he too, began to run.

He heard her follow, as they both passed the bodies of Cam and Beverly, weaving between the cubes and into the straight pathway to the rear of the building. There were four stairwells, one on each side of the building. One led to the basement, while the other three only went up. But within each stairwell was an emergency exit door, leading to the outside.

Behind them, hundreds of people crowded into the large building through the single open door. Hundreds of people who had been drawn by the crowd--a crowd that had begun to form when a single cellular phone made a single ring inside a darkened building. A crowd that, for the most part, had filtered out of the opened, shattered and bloody doors of Harbor Island General Hospital next door.

It was a crowd that hadn't existed several hours ago--a crowd that used to be people but were now mindless and desperate. A crowd that was always hungry.

Bridget and Louis sprinted, their thin legs and bodies unused to physical exertion growing weary before they reached the opposite side of the building. In front of them, Ty had reached the stairwell door and slammed it open, several women close behind him. He flew to the exterior door and slammed his shoulder against the thick metal, his hip pressing the latch and unlocking the mechanism.

Louis reached the stairwell door first, and between gasps for air watched as Ty pushed the door hard, meeting resistance from the other side. Too late, he croaked a weak "Stop!"

From outside the door, several hands lashed into the open space, pulling the young man through the gap and into the dawn beyond. Off balance and plunging forward, he could scream only once as he was pulled forward, headlong into a waiting crowd outside. Bridget screamed as she reached the doorway, watching as more flooded to the opening, quickly overtaking the large, motherly woman whose dress was still stained with Cam's blood, and dragging her to the ground. Ty's garbled and wet screams tore through the air, and the sounds of moans outside echoed in the stairwell. A single, detached hand flew against the door and fell sloppily to the cement floor as Louis backed out of the doorway.

Creatures stumbled on the two bodies, and the clusters of people around them, falling in clumsy heaps near the open door. Louis and Bridget scrambled back, heads whipping around, looking for the last stairwell.

It was across the building, but the crowd from the front was still filtering through the cubes toward where they stood now.

They didn't speak.

They didn't have to.

As one, they tore across the carpet, exhaustion and breathlessness forgotten, adrenaline pumping through their veins.

Their feet slammed against the cheap flooring.

Their breathing echoed against the incessant walls of plastic and tin.

Behind them, the crowd streaming in from the front doors had split. Nearly half of the creatures had followed the rest of the group to the other side of the building. Against the far wall, a small man named Joe, whose wife was expecting their fourth child, and who had been laid off from his job as an attorney merely weeks before and had gotten this job to pay the mounting medical bills, opened the door Louis had slammed behind him minutes ago. He was pulled into the stairwell, where Tiny waited with a large new friend, flaps of skin hanging uselessly from his large frame. The man who had been Antonio reached hungrily forward.

In the shadow of Robert's screams, amidst the moans and the guttural cacophony, Louis ran.

In a men's bathroom near the main entrance, an older woman named Peggy huddled crouched upon a toilet sprinkled with urine. The smell of waterless urinals invaded her fortress as she whimpered slightly in fear. Peggy, whose husband had so recently retired and who had dreamed of traveling across the United States in an RV, and who had only days left until her own retirement, cried alone in an empty men's room. She thought of her six month old grandchild, and of her small dogs.

She thought of her life before. And she wept.

Outside the unlocked bathroom door, several creatures, slowed by the mass of flesh at the doors, heard her soft whimpers.

She screamed once when the door to the bathroom opened.

As Peggy's cries for help echoed in the brightly lit madhouse, Louis ran.

In front of Louis, tears streamed down Bridget's pale cheeks, streaking what was left of her makeup and making trails through the crusted remnants of Beverly's blood. She tripped once, but pulled herself up, crying as she heard the sound of footfalls on her left.

The remaining half of the herd of creatures was paralleling Louis and Bridget's headlong flight, hemmed in by a wall of cubicles. Merely ten feet away in some places, their ruined faces and bloody arms tracked the two as they sprinted for their last hope, which was drawing inexorably closer.

Louis watched as at least five of them dragged down the last of the customer retention reps, who had tried to hide in a cubicle but had been discovered. Multiple bite wounds adorned her arms as she pinwheeled onto the floor, overtaken and overwhelmed. They fell on her like lions on a gazelle, and a fountain of blood--Louis assumed it to be from a severed artery--streaked into the air and against the flat screen monitor several feet away.

He wiped the bile from his mouth, pushing himself the last ten feet. Ahead of him, Bridget fell against the last door, merely twenty feet away from the first of the large group that were staggering forward through the line of cubes. The door blasted open and slammed against the wall of the empty stairwell, and Louis fell through, nearly catapulting himself over the railing as he flew into the relative safety of the hardened walls. He turned to the door, pushing it shut against the hydraulic arm, and cursing as it moved too slowly.

Bridget reached the external door and paused.

"How do we know ..." she began, but he simply shook his head.

They didn't know, but this was the last door. They had no way to see, to look outside and tell if Ty's fate waited for them. No way to determine if safety existed.

"Fuck it," she spat, slamming her hand against the lever and pushing the door outward.

It stopped only inches from the frame.

"Shut it, shut it!" he screamed, even as the first body hit the door to the stairwell behind him, fists and hands and feet and mouths and teeth grinding and slamming into the metal from the other side. The door slammed him in the back as Bridget managed to pull hers shut, neatly severing a single pinky finger that fell to the floor of the stairwell landing. She cursed and looked at him struggling against the tide of creatures behind him. Hands were snaking into the gap between the door and the frame, arms pushing through, then faces. Moans sliced into the empty stairwell.

"Up," he said, gasping for breath, and then leaping forward, watching as her blue-haired form climbed the first set. He fell forward, gashing his hand on the cement floor and struggling up the first several steps.

Behind Louis, the door slammed open, several bodies falling through and a stench of foul body odor and the copper smell of blood filtering into his protesting nostrils.

He followed Bridget up the stairs and through the door to the second floor, listening to the innumerable footfalls behind him.

"What now?" he said, voice high and panicked. She was looking around anxiously, watching as several heads bobbed clumsily on the far side of the floor.

Shit. They were upstairs.

"Gotta be the skylight," she said curtly, still short of breath. She didn't pause, didn't stop. She started to run toward the center of the building.

"Shit god dammit," he said under his breath before following. Bodies slammed against the door behind him as he realized that this was it. If they couldn't get through the only window in the building, the game was over. The building that had for so long crushed his soul, would now reave it from his body. He wanted to scream with the hopelessness of it all.

Bridget disappeared into the small room in the center of the floor, and as he stumbled in, watched her as she pulled the single table underneath the spot of daylight. She left the table and grabbed the fire extinguisher near the fridge, climbing to the table top and barely pausing before flinging the heavy metal tube toward the window pane.

Cheap glass shattered and she flung her hands to her face, showered by shards and small pieces of dirty window.

"You have to go first," she said quickly, crouching down on the table, and looking over his shoulder at the opening stairwell door, head whipping to the side as the second smaller group started to shamble toward the room.

He was leaning over, gasping for breath and struggling for air. She punched him hard on the shoulder, and he stood up.

"What? Why?"

She grimaced and grabbed his arm, pulling him up after her.

"Because, fuck-tard, I don't have enough strength to pull myself up or help you up. I can help boost you, and you can pull me up. Don't argue, just get up there." She webbed her two hands together and crouched down, signaling to him to step in her clasped hands.

Louis looked up, noting the distance and taking a breath. It wasn't impossible, if she helped. If she pushed him up, he could probably do it.

He had never been an upper body strength kind of guy. He couldn't even do ten pushups. Shit, he could barely hold himself up while making love to his girlfriend.

Not that that happened that often anymore.

"Louis! God damn it! We...are...going...to...die!" She screamed each word, emphasizing the last, and he looked over her shoulder. The creatures were barely fifteen feet away.

There were so many. So much blood.

Some carried pieces of other human bodies. Others bore gaping wounds where their limbs--or organs--had once been.

So much blood.

He stepped into her hands and he flew upward.

His hands grasped broken shards of glass and he screamed, but held on, blood running down his arms immediately. He cringed as he felt it run in rivulets into his armpits, following the contours of his upraised arms.

Below him, Bridget screamed and pushed, giving him the inertia he needed to do a single, life saving pull-up. He scrambled to the gravel surface of the roof, and turned around quickly, the small of tar and asphalt thick in his nose as he lay stomach down on the already warm black rooftop.

Below, Bridget's blue hair flashed as she whipped her head around, facing a threat yet unseen from his vantage point and screaming. From directly below him, a head lashed forward, teeth flashing and arms pulling. The creature took her leg out from under her and she tumbled to the table top. She thrashed, legs kicking and slamming into the face of a man in a bloody suit. Her foot connected with the jaw, and she stood quickly. He reached down, and she jumped, her hands grasping his wrists in an iron grip. A grip that was clearly informed by the fear of impending death.

The creature surged forward, even as three more staggered through the doorway, stumbling against one another in their urge to find their prey.

He started to pull her up, and she thrashed about, struggling to keep her legs from being grasped by the many hands below. She swung in his arms and he yelled, unable to make his arms pull the moving weight. He felt himself move forward slightly, as the faint incline of the roof began to betray him. Louis was slipping toward the opening.

Below him, Bridget screamed suddenly, her voice betraying an agony not contained to physical pain. He watched as the man in the suit bit into her captured calf, her pants affording no protection as he pulled the thick chunk of flesh from her bone, seeming to detach from the body in slow motion. Trailing streams of blood, the creature leaned its head back and saw Louis, opening his mouth as he did so and giving Louis a view of Bridget's death knell.

Bridget had never known such pain. Never in her life had she imagined that she could be hurt like this. So primitively, so primal. She screamed in pain, and in fear. She watched Louis' eyes change. She watched his face as his eyes pronounced her death sentence. She heard him whisper the last human words she would ever hear.

"I'm so sorry."

His fingers released her forearms and she grasped for the last few seconds of life until the blood on his arms made her lose her grip.

Then, Bridget fell.

Louis turned his head away as they took her. He saw a flash of skin as her shirt was ripped from her torso, nearly twenty creatures crammed into the room as her stomach and breasts were exposed to the ravaging, hungry horde. Her shirt was shredded, and her pants lasted merely seconds longer. Hands darted in, broken nails and jagged teeth, shattered on unknown surfaces, tearing into her soft flesh.

He began to cry, even as she screamed.

Her agony lasted longer than the others. Whatever was done to her was done slowly, without death coming quickly, amongst at least twenty of the creatures. He eventually moved away from the skylight, toward the vast expanse of roof. He moved away from her pain and her death.

As he stared out over the suburban dawn, he watched absently as the slowly winding smoke of distant fires rose to the sky with the same consistency as his tears fell to the ground.

A blossom of flame spun into the air several blocks away, eventually adding to the countless fires burning fitfully in the distance.

Louis sat down heavily on the gravel roof, and for the first time, focused on the mass of humanity clustered below, swarming against the sides of the building. Hundreds streamed from the streets around the building to join their brethren in their hungry vigil. The smells of a new world greeted him with each change of the wind.

Smoke. Chemicals. Blood.

He even though that he could smell fear. Fear and desperation.

He wondered absently about his girlfriend, realizing now that he had never loved her.

But he was sad about the dog.

Fancy that.

Then, he began to laugh. As the sun rose on a ruined city--a city so quickly brought to its knees by uncontrollable circumstance and a collapse of the normal and routine--Louis laughed. The peals of mirth rolled down the cement walls of the bleak bank building.

The laughter filtered over the heads of hundreds of creatures, many of whom turned their heads to this sound of humanity.

To the sound of food.

And still he laughed, as if nothing else remained of the world--or in it.

As if it could fill the void of lost souls.

As if he were the only soul remaining, and his laughter would keep the darkness at bay.

***

As the sun rose on the new day, from Maine to California and from Washington to Florida, cities were burning, and people were dying. Some news stations were still broadcasting, and some roads still open. Some areas would even hold off for days before succumbing to the plague. But the major cities were falling fast, and no response was, or could be, effective.

Thousands of miles from Harbor Island, in a hospital in New York, an orderly was administering a heavy dose of sedative to a well-known patient. The dosage should have been enough to kill a normal man.

But it didn't.

Days from when Louis emerged onto the roof of the large banking building, this man would awaken into a world that had drastically changed.

A world that was burning.

A world that had for eons belonged to man, but that now belonged to the dead.

###

Scroll down for more zombie goodness, and for a note from the author!

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Want to read some more zombie books? Follow the story of Mike McKnight, a former action movie star who awakens in a mental hospital in the middle of this plague--and doesn't know what the hell is going on.

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A Note from the Author

We all wish that we would be the hero. The Antonio, not the Louis, right?

In a time when tragedy strikes or chaos takes over, we all imagine ourselves as standing up for what is right and doing what is necessary. It is a comforting thought, one that makes us snuggle up cozily in our sheets, and keeps us warm and fuzzy in our mental comfort zones. But is that realistic? I would argue that it isn't.

Throughout history, massive populations of people--millions, not just hundreds--have been cowed into doing what was easy, not what was hard. They have been convinced that their mortality trumps their morality, and that survival beats conscience like rock beats scissors. And are they wrong? They have survived, and in many times and many places, those who stand up for what is right end up dying for it.

Because what is right to do--to be the hero, to sacrifice for others, to be the strongest and the selfless--is not, strictly speaking, a natural impulse. It couldn't be, or else many of the worst atrocities in history couldn't have occurred and there would be extortion or sweat shops or genocides. There would be only altruism.

And we all know that ain't the case.

A friend recently pointed out to me that studies have been done where individuals lay moaning in apparent pain on the ground in high traffic, public places across the world, and out of thousands of people, only a handful stopped to investigate and to ask those people whether they were in trouble. Out of thousands.

I would put to you that this is a face of humanity.

So why go into this tangent? Well, I'm pretty sure that most folks are not going to be fans of Louis. And I get it. I wrote him that way for a reason.

Louis is a real guy. He's the guy next to you at work, or the woman in the carpool with you. He's the guy in the drive-through who's so polite to the woman behind the window, and he's the man who always gives a little more at church. He is the man or woman who is comfortable in society, and plays by the rules. He is, in reality, all of us. At least in the baser sense. He is our impulses and our primal being.

Now you're saying to yourself, "Self, I think he just called us a spineless jackal! Are we going to take that?"

Calm down.

I think the real point is that some--not all, and not a majority, but some--of humanity have this hero-gene, or this savior-impulse, or whatever it is that motivates war heroes and our great leaders and our civil rights icons, and any number of others who, backs to the wall, make the hard choices. To sacrifice for others and to be the person who does, not because it is easy, but because it is necessary. Not because it is natural, but because it is important.

Are you that person?

Am I?

We'll probably never know. I would venture only one in a million people ever get to prove themselves in that way.

But here's hoping that it stays that way. Because I for one am quite comfortable not knowing.

I hope you enjoyed the story and keep on stayin' alive.

Bryan

