A sharp whining sound, brief but distinct, carried from one of the closed offices, he couldn’t tell which. His first instinct was to hurry away, so he scanned for the EXIT. The sound again, this time in definition as a female voice, without words, imploring, pathetic. His best guess for its origin was the middle office. The voice sounded close. Mr Wayfarer was always in the distance. Maybe she knew the way out.
He stepped to the middle office door and opened it.
The city met him, glass panels perpendicular across the street reflecting milky honey in hive-like gold, the surrounding buildings imposing opulent recidivism in refraction. A female cough made him look at the floor beside the wrought iron desk. The woman lay, her legs and lower body gone, entrails—splayed underneath her highest end jacket—encrusted into, and interwoven with, the tight fibres of the steel blue carpet. She stared at him with wide eyes that hungered to escape from her face.
Kattar stumbled back, hitting the door a little, then bent forwards and propped himself with one arm on the desk. She started to cry, long distended whines, weakly expelled because there was nothing behind them, full of her perplexed end. Light beams spotlighted her from behind, an industrial nimbus caught in tacky hairspray.
Against his will he went to her, fighting his repulsion. Leaning awkwardly on one knee, he placed a steadying arm behind her shoulders. “What can I do?” She smelt really bad.
Despite her condition she breathed fairly reliably. “I won’t die,” she said, manic, “I’ve been here for days.” She coughed, catarrh leaking, rot on her death breath.
Kattar twitched, held his breath for as long as he could. The mess of innards was necrotic at the extremities but life pulsed closer to the body, spasming guts prickling amid the bodily goo. Blood blushed her cheeks and sweat ran down her face in teardrops. “I’ll go phone for help,” he said.
“The phones only work for calls made to inside the building.” She clenched her teeth and hugged her tremulous remaining body.
“What about email? Where’s your mobile?”
“We’re not allowed cell phones,” she said, her accent now American, “and all outside communication was severed days ago because of the threat level. We over thresholded on risk assessment.”
“You can’t be the only person here. Tell me where to go and I’ll get someone to help you.”
Her breathing accelerated. “There are others but I don’t think they’d help me. Not now. I’m marked you see. I got away from him.” She laughed, from her gut. “I don’t have knowledge of that ever happening before. I bet he wants me though, more than the random encounters he feeds on normally. He’s had some of me and probably won’t rest until I’m all his.”
“Mr Wayfarer.”
She quietened and stared at him. “How do you know about him? You’re an innocent.”
“The man in the corridor back there told me, the one wearing a suit.”
“I don’t know who he is, could be anyone.” She trembled violently. “Go get Anna, she’s the only one who will listen. Perhaps.”
“Okay. Where’s Anna?”
“Go to my desk. There’s a red passcard, gold lettering. It will let you access the higher levels. Anna took off. She was with me when it happened. She escaped. I don’t blame her for leaving me. She tried to stay. He’s quick.”
Kattar disentangled himself from her, lowering her pale frame backwards until her head rested against the books at the bottom of a decorative shelf unit. The desk had one drawer which squeaked on its runners as he opened it. The passcard sat as if waiting for him.
“I don’t know where she is,” she said, fading, “—just up, just up. Tell my friend I’m still here. She might want to be with me. By now she’s seen there’s no way out.”
Kattar stared at her, feeling it unfair to question her further in her increasing delirium. “I’m heading for the exit, so if I find that first I’m taking it.”
“I know. But you won’t find it. We’ve been hunting it for so long. So few of us left. Hiding now. Delaying the inevitable.” Her breaths were sharp intakes, punctuating the effort of speech. Liquid seeped from her, soaking into the weaves of the carpet, fat throbs shifting the fleshy tubes spilling her life.
A dark splat hit the glass behind Kattar, leaving a dirty slash across the window. It oozed streaky red, pinks, sometimes a hint of blue or purple. Another drop came creeping from above, running down the outside of the pane in slime and gristle, lumps of pinkish tissue smearing a sticky trail.
The woman panted. “Don’t worry. It’s just the Jumpers. They’ve jumped so many times they’re just mush now. It’s not as traumatic as at first, when they still looked like people. It was tough seeing them fall over and over. Slowly they started to break down. Now all that’s left of them is this goo.”
Behind the desk, the wide windowpane overlooked the companion building opposite, the outside bathed in funnelled sunlight. The glass gradually filled with the jelly of flesh, a scarlet filter of the city beyond, and a soft reddish haze covered everything inside the office.
“You better go,” she said in the ruddy murk, “sometimes he comes when the Jumpers put down their curtain.”
kvin
Kattar scarpered through the chrome cubicles and headed to the far corner of the floor, up to a pair of metallic lifts. The lights to indicate which floor the lifts were arriving at flickered wildly. He turned away from them and blasted through an access door to another vacant echoey stairwell.
The climb was swift, passcard held tightly against his wounded palm. After a number of levels he slowed, awed by wide and ornate double doors glistening silver in the waning light. A plastic card reader ran from the top of the meeting of the doors right to the bottom. He placed the dark red of the passcard between the firm lips of the reader at the highest point of the doors and steadily dragged it southwards, a bright light trail following its descent. When the white hot light reached the length of the doors and the passcard hit the floor he retracted it and stood back. The doors released with a resounding crack, so loud he fell into the wall behind him. Ajar only a little, all inside was black, a big nothing, as it had been with the curtain from the first stairwell. And just as before he went inside, to find the EXIT.
The theatre was empty, brighter, he could see more of it through the gloomy light this time, though its edges remained elusive. He wouldn’t dawdle in the place. The feeling that someone had only just coughed and left the room hit him. He rushed to where he’d found the way out before, the doorway in the dark he’d hurt himself trying to round. Now in the twilight of the stage there was no door, only old plaster and paint, an oddness to its colour.
The pit hummed at him, calling him forward, inviting his compliance. If he didn’t want to be stuck he’d have to move through didactic pathways, sacrifice his will to self-govern in extremis and resolve to temporarily surrender to whatever capricious assholes turned the cogs of the place.
He took the old steps to the stage floor and wandered to where the builder had sat. The pit was still and shadowy, no hint of the struggle that had taken place within. The emptiness soothed him and he allowed himself a pause to wilfully forget about his EXIT. Under the theatre light that fell on him, especially his face.
Name.
Take to the centre and forsake the mask, wear your best then let her undress you, all the moments flicker past in her, you stole her you know, hustled her like a numbskull in fluke, couldn’t ride her waves incandescent, so she spat you out poisoned chalice style, her movements pyrrhic victories you’d hold against her because she shone her fractured light on your want, now you wander umbilical precipitating perfected shits, walking away, forever walking away.