LZR-1143: Within (2 page)

“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.