Mike pushed her foot up and Dora scrambled into the vent, it was a wide fit and she was easily able to crawl along to the point where it turned upwards, standing up on the thin metal made a great gonging sound and for a second Dora thought she was going to fall through the vent into whatever room was below her, but it only bent a few inches then held her weight. She poked her head at the end of the vent, which was about a foot above her head, it looked, she thought, like one of those furnace filters, only it was all brown, she touched it and released a cloud of dirt and dust on top of herself. She let out a scream and pulled back away from it coughing and mad as she retreated into the vent.
"What is it?" Mike yelled seeing her crawling back.
"It's…It's…DIRT! All dirty and doesn't go anywhere anyway, now I am just dirty and trapped."
Mike helped her out of the vent and Dora plopped down on the desktop with an exasperated look. "I thought vents always led to a way out?"
"You sure it's a dead end?" asked Paige, Mike was already trying to get into the vent.
"Yeah, go look for yourself if you don't believe me, you'll just get dirty." Dora said. Once Mike was in Dora handed him the flashlight and he took off down the ducting. Dora, watching his scrawny backside was mortified that the duct work didn't give under his weight nearly as much as it had when she was in there. 'I don't weigh more than a punk assed kid, do I?'
Mike got to the filter and poked it tentatively with the screwdriver, which he had also brought along. He managed to get a hole through the filter and could not see anything beyond with the weak light from the small flashlight. He couldn't see any way to get the filter out of the way, aside from tearing it apart. Still not sure if he should he was just getting ready to head back down into the office, when he was struck by the idea that the filter probably was slid in from the side. He stuck the screwdriver back into the hole he made and tried pushing the filter sideways, the first direction he tried worked. He heard a clatter as the cap on the filter fell off on the outside and was rewarded with a thin sliver of light, through which he could see the flat top of the roof.
"I can see the rooftop!" he yelled back down the vent.
"Yeah, but can we get out that way?" Dora called back.
"I think I can force the metal apart, it's not that strong."
Dora looked at Paige and raised a questioning eyebrow. Paige nodded and yelled, "You better do it!"
The pounding on the door was growing in intensity; part of the safety glass was shattered near the bottom. However there were thin wires running through it that held the glass in place. While Mike was pounding on the metal above them Paige bent over and peered out through the small cracks in the glass.
"It's them." she whispered to Dora, who was still on the desk.
"Them who?" Dora asked loudly.
"Shh! It's the infected, the zombies."
Shaking her head sadly Dora said, "Oh? I thought maybe it was one of your missing employees wanting to talk to us. Of course it's them, you stupid girl! Don't 'shush' me either and don't whisper, I think they know we are here. Now get up here and let's see if we can stuff you into this vent."
Paige flashed Dora a brief angry look and climbed up onto the desk. Despite Dora's comments and Paige's own image of herself as being fat, she was not so large that she couldn't squeeze through the vent into the shaft beyond. Her hips, which were ample, fit with nary a squeeze and she was soon at Mike's feet while he pressed the sides of the vent outwards in a bid to escape. She had managed to keep hold of her stick through the process too and it lay at her side on the floor of the vent.
Chapter 6
Mike was having a tough time with the sheet metal. At first he thought he could force it open easily at the seam along one corner, but that was proving hard to do. The venting pierced the roof at this point and that was having a considerable effect on his ability to force the sides apart. In fact he was not so sure he could get out now. He tried pushing the screw driver through the metal and it went through easily, he then made a line of punctures to find out where the roof was and where the venting was above the roof. Then he had the bright idea to use the screwdriver to pry the slot the filter had slid out of to make it wider, so at least he would have more light. While doing so he started sweating and on one particularly hard jerk downwards the screwdriver slipped from his grasp, flicked upwards just so and toppled through the enlarged opening out onto the rooftop.
Dora hopped off the desk back in the office, she was certain she could get up through the vent, now that Paige was gone and wouldn't see her stepping on top of a filing cabinet to do so. Creeping towards the door she looked through the cracked glass and couldn't see much of anything, it looked like a man's shirt. As he backed away for another swing she saw that it was indeed a man. Someone dressed in a business suit who looked like father time had kicked the living shit out of him. He was an African American male wrinkled down to a small prune sized shadow of his former glory. Probably he weighed less than Dora did. She wondered if being infected made him look like that, then shook her head, even viewing them on the small television the ones Ned had been fighting didn't look all old and wrinkly.
The old man hit the door again and Dora noticed more movement in the hallway, another zombie was there, a woman who made Paige look anorexic. This one was apparently a naturalist as she didn't have a stitch of clothing on. Her skin was an even pale white color, except for her slightly tanned face and arms. Dora couldn't see her feet, but seeing the woman's massive buttocks turned towards her elicited a groan of disgust from her mouth before she could stop herself. The woman had a huge mole on her ass; it was so large that it was probably cancerous.
'Why didn't people take care of shit like that?' she asked herself. Upon hearing her moan both zombies, who had slacked off a bit, turned back towards the door and started pounding it again, giving Dora an extreme close up of the fat woman's sagging belly, which was low enough down to hide her brown pubic hair.
"Ugh! Fat swirls! Damn that's ugly." she said out loud.
The door suffered a few more heavy hits, ratting in its frame. Looking at the door, Dora didn't think she had anything to worry about; it was metal and strong enough to keep anything they could throw at it out.
"The idiots, this door is way stronger than the wall, if they started smashing that we would be in trouble." she clapped her hands over her mouth as the pounding on the door stopped. Then, unmistakably, something hit the wall to the right side of the door.
Dora backed up until her butt hit the desk. "Oh shit. They did not just hear that. No, no, no, no!"
The wall took another couple of hits and Dora heard a tearing crumbling sound, then another hit sounded louder and the wall on her side bulged inwards. "Fuck!" she spat out. Bending over she picked up the vent grate from where it was on the floor, determined to wedge it into the duct to hide her retreat. Climbing on the desk she looked down for something to wedge the grate into place. Tape, a stapler, anything to try and attach the grating to the wall after her. Her eyes came to rest on the faded, plastic tool box. It was like a book, with molded plastic holding the various tools in place and one 'page' between the covers, she flipped the middle section over to see what was on the other side, a small cheap looking hammer and various pieces of general use hardware in plastic bins. There was a round slot that Dora recognized had probably held duct tape at one time, however it was empty.
She picked out the hammer and then noticed the circle of wire. Nodding to herself she pulled it out and tossed it up into the vent. Laying the grate sideways and flat she pushed it into the vent as well before crawling in herself. Once inside she ignored Paige's requests about what was going on and contorted herself to get turned around.