The white-eyed June jumps onto her back with a furious scream. Ben slams them both back into the wall behind, knocking June off-balance, but she’s back on her feet in seconds and fighting viciously. She hurls Miranda aside and attacks Ben.
June cracks Ben’s head against the sink – again – again. Water from the taps is spraying everywhere. Ben kicks June’s feet out from under her. She slips on the wet floor and is impaled by the roof of her mouth on one of the taps. Red water pumps from her lips.
‘Jesus – June –’ Ben fearfully examines June’s eyes. ‘It’s some final stage of poisoning.’
‘The air – the ventilation shaft goes all the way down, doesn’t it?’ Miranda looks up at the wall ventilation unit. Ben climbs up onto a sink and starts hammering at the grille, but it’s sealed shut. He desperately looks around the bathroom. As the shouts outside get louder, he grabs one of the heavy cistern lids and starts slamming it into the grille.
It bursts open just as the bathroom door starts coming apart. He pushes Miranda up, and then climbs in after her.
They start along the wide pipe, which meets up with the main ventilator shaft – a sheer vertiginous drop of hundreds of feet. The only way down is via a thin steel maintenance ladder. Above, they can hear the nightmarish sounds of the invading workers.
Miranda stops dead. ‘I can’t do it, Ben, not again. I’ve got no strength left.’
‘You have to,’ he says simply. He attempts to carry her, but she’s awkward and nervous. He slips and falls. They land on the outcrop of another shaft twelve feet down.
He doggedly picks her up, but finds he’s damaged his leg badly. Above them, the first of the crazed workers – could it be Mr Beamish from Costings and Estimates? – arrives through the pipe and plunges past them into the shaft. As he falls, he makes a grab for Miranda and very nearly pulls her in with him, but Ben hangs onto her for dear life. She leads the way down – but the section of ladder suddenly ends. It’s a distance of at least twenty feet to where the next section starts.
‘That’s it,’ says Ben, ‘We’re screwed.’
‘At least we were going down this time.’
There’s a tunnel opening to their left. It’s a swing and a drop, but now they’re beyond caring for their own safety. Ben kicks out the grating at the end of it.
They land in the corridor of the deserted ninth floor, and head toward the stairwell. Ben can barely walk. Somewhere above them are eerie booms and screams, all manner of mayhem.
At least the coast looks clear. They continue their descent through smoke, past smaller fires. Shadowy figures dash past ahead. They are in still in the realm of nightmares. Eight floors, one after the other. There’s hardly anyone left alive, and certainly no-one sane.
On the ground floor of the stairwell, someone emerges very slowly and silently from the shadows. His face is blackened with ash, and his wide eyes are a hard, dead white. He learned stealth from an early age. There’s nothing like inherited wealth for instilling guile. A huge hunting rifle is beside him, an extension of his arm.
Dr Samphire might not realise it, but he’s showing how he earned his nickname of Dracula.
Ben and Miranda hobble down the stairs. Above them, crazies are starting to spill into the stairwell. The frenzied staffers are gaining on them. In great pain, Ben drags himself on, with Miranda trying to speed him up.
‘We won’t be able to get out at the bottom,’ he shouts.
‘What the fuck else can we do?’ she yells. ‘You want to stay up there and die?’
They reach the staircase above the ground floor of the stairwell. Dr Samphire slinks back into the shadows, watching and waiting for his moment.
They start running through the darkened ground floor. Ahead, its doors wide open, is the great glass atrium with its tropical forest of real and fake plants.
They look up and are amazed to see that the key is still there on the atrium roof. A few feet away from it is Meera, stranded on crazed patterns of cracked glass. She’s almost there, but can go no further.
As Ben and Miranda run into the atrium, Dr Samphire steps from between the lurid artificial palm trees, the rifle across his chest. He’s making a last stand in the business jungle.
They can’t go forward – and, thanks to the angry mob pouring into the ground floor behind them, they can’t go back.
‘Well, well.’ Dr Samphire doesn’t look at all happy with them. ‘Disruption, chaos, anarchy, disorder. Another great temple of commerce brought to its knees by people who don’t know the meaning of an honest day’s work. I hope you’re very pleased with yourselves.’ He walks toward them calmly, raising the rifle high. Think of them as deer, he tells himself, or grouse. Ben tries to get out of the way, but his leg lets him down and he falls.
The chairman fires the rifle. The bullet splinters a palm trunk. There is an ominous creaking noise. It grows, accompanied by a great rustling.
‘You can’t build the world by yourselves, so you come to us and whine when it doesn’t turn out how you wanted,’ the Chairman continues. ‘You’re shocked because people want to make money from your ideas. You half-heartedly try to stop them, picketing the headquarters of McDonald’s or Coca Cola. You forget that the world prefers standardisation and dull efficiency. It’s what your average, telly-ogling proles crave most of all, something boring that does the job and never changes, and they’re prepared to give up most of their rights to get it.’
Ben and Miranda are frozen on the spot. Ben looks up and sees that Meera is still reaching for the key.
Dr Samphire follows his eyeline and aims the rifle at the girl on the roof. He wishes he’d brought his glasses with him. He fires. Meera falls in an explosion of glass and with a cry of: ‘Jesus Bollocks Son Of A Bitch, not again!’
Ben and Miranda pull Meera from fake ferns and polystyrene-ball earth. As Dr Samphire takes aim once more, he is joined by Fitch and Half-Swan. What a trio they make.
‘It always comes down to this,’ he tells them. ‘Management versus the workforce. Compared with the next generation of wage-slaves, we’re radical socialists.’ Dr Samphire splits the palm trunk again with his rifle shot. He fires at his staff as they break through into the undergrowth.
Management picks its targets. Fitch attacks Miranda. Half-Swan goes for Ben. Dr Samphire goes after Meera.
Ben’s had enough of his half-supervisor. ‘Let’s see what you’re made of,’ he suggests, thrusting his hand up inside Half-Swan and pulling down hard. Swan screams, and Ben swings him around, knocking his brains out on a painted concrete tree trunk.
Ben feels better. Killing someone seems to have cleared his head. ‘Anybody else want a piece?’ he asks, over-confidently.
Miranda tackles Fitch, slamming her to the ground. ‘You know,’ she tells her, ‘we could have been friends if you hadn’t tried so hard to be one of the boys.’ She slugs her as you would a man, a one-two shot, first one hard in the stomach then a haymaker to the chin, sending her flying off into the bushes and out for the count. ‘I saw that in a Tarantino film,’ she explains proudly.
Dr Samphire comes after Meera, and gets a clear shot. Meera is against a wall – there’s nowhere left to run.
The Chairman points accusingly. ‘You – you’re the worst. When we had an Empire, we owned people like you. And this – this – is the thanks we get.’
He goes to fire, but Meera is free to unleash her formidable martial skills, fairly flying at him with her feet and catching him under the chin. Dr Samphire is fast, though. He has the rifle back in his cradled arm in seconds. Ben knows the Chairman can take them out. He has to do something drastic.
Ben steps forward and raises a placating hand, as Miranda shouts at him.