We ran and turned and turned and turned again, hoping that our haphazard movements made it more difficult for anyone to find us or catch up to us, and then, because we weren’t spies or special agents but were desk jockeys and horribly out of shape, we had to stop, catch our breath.
After that, we decided it wasn’t so much fun. We had lost Carl and the fire map since Carl was the one carrying it when they took him. We thought we’d been heading left for a while. We didn’t know directions, though — east, west, north, south — and mostly our only hope was that we weren’t going to land back at Laura’s office.
There were five of us left and one of us was an intern, so really, there were four of us left, since in these situations the intern was always one of the first to go.
We found ourselves in a wide hallway, maybe near accounting, but we would have to have asked Carl about that but we couldn’t and so we stopped and leaned against the wall and placed our hands on our knees and breathed in as deeply as we could. We stood there and the intern said, joking but not joking, too, “I’m too old for this shit,” and then Frank said, “I only had two days till retirement,” and then the intern said, “Really?” and we said, everyone but the intern, “Shut the fuck up, kid,” and we stood ourselves up straight and we stretched our necks and pushed out our chests to stretch our backs. The intern started stretching out his hamstrings or his quads and we shook our heads at him, and as we stood there, an arm, a mechanical arm, came around the corner at the far end of the hall and began to snake its way past us.
Or didn’t snake.
Snake is not what it did.
It was an unsettling sight, that bodiless monstrosity, half-covered in tattered pieces of skin, coming toward us. Not that any of us had ever spent considerable time pondering the way an arm might move itself — maybe humping itself forward like some kind of legless caterpillar — but seeing an arm move itself toward us made each of us realize that we probably would have imagined it wrong. Its fingers dug into the floor, gouging out hunks of carpet and the foam padding underneath it and the concrete slab beneath that with each grab, and then it threw itself forward, by what leverage or law of physical motion we didn’t know, but it was oddly reminiscent, to at least one of us, of a cheetah, but without the cheetah attached.
We stood there quiet and still as the arm came up even with us and Frank moved to touch it or grab it, none of us were sure why, but the intern touched Frank lightly on the shoulder and shook his head and said quietly, “I wouldn’t if I were you.”
We weren’t sure if Frank’s moving or the intern’s speaking or neither of those made that arm stop, but it stopped, and the hand swiveled around on the wrist, but not the way a hand should swivel, and it turned to look at us, as if the hand were the thing’s head, the fingers some kind of antennae or feelers. We flinched back, thinking maybe the tips of the fingers would be electronic eyes or something worse, but the tips were just tips, with bits of carpet sloughing free and dusting the floor.
And then it turned back and resumed its strange, gouging push forward, and then it was gone, and for a moment, we looked at each other, unsure what to say about what the hell had just happened, and this was too much, too patently absurd, and the only response to the patently absurd is hysterical laughter, which lasted maybe five full minutes. Our faces were sore from the strain of laughing and the grime on our faces was cut through by tear streaks. And then the laughter petered out and we moved onward, ever onward, one of us chuckling on occasion, the bunch of us thinking to ourselves, What strange and thrilling times we live in. Thinking: How amazing that we are alive and part of such a unique world. A world you felt, at one point, might be full of nothing more than reality singing competitions and Donald Trumps and Kardashians and Angelina Jolie’s cute ethnic kids, and Carson Daly, a world that hardly seemed worth saving, worth all of this effort, and then, and then.
“That was fucking incredible,” Frank said.
And then we turned the corner and found five men dressed all in black, all of them dead. Their rifles broken into pieces, their necks snapped, their eyes gouged out, one with his tongue torn from his mouth.
We stood there over the dead for less than a minute, remarking on the number of bullet holes in the walls and the floor and the ceiling, making note of how fucking lucky we were just now, lucky that the hand didn’t murder us, too, when a second team of men arrived, turning around the opposite corner, catching sight of their dead comrades and the five of us standing over their dead comrades but not registering exactly what had happened, and then one of the guys straightened up and looked at us and said, Holy fuck, which made the others stop and take stock of this tableau, and then there were rifles, maybe seven of them, pointed at us.
There was a pause. We could see it in their faces, the disbelief and the confusion. The scene seemed to point in one direction — that our motley crew had dispatched these soldiers — while the look of us seemed to point in the exact opposite direction, and our first instinct was to throw our hands up and surrender ourselves, to assure them that we had had no hand in any of this (ha, ha), that we had once been hostages, that he was on the sales team and that one, too, and that one over there was a project manager or something, and this one, this one right here, with the cheap haircut and the ill-fitting pleated khakis, was an intern, a fucking intern for Christ’s sake. Of course, there was no way we could have done any of this. Except that before we could even raise our hands or open our mouths, the intern dove for one of the bodies, dove more quickly, more fluidly, than any of us would have expected possible, and came back up with the dead guy’s rifle in his hands and managed to squeeze off a couple of rounds.
Which would have been amazing, if he hadn’t missed. If he hadn’t severely missed. We wouldn’t have been surprised if he hadn’t just missed those guys but the walls behind those guys, too, was how badly he missed. He was a goddamn intern.
Then they recovered and then they started to shoot, and they — they did not miss.
We lost Larry, who might have been just shot or who might’ve been shot dead, but who wasn’t, regardless, following after us as we ran away. We felt sorry for him, but not sorry enough to stop. And we abandoned the intern. Fuck that guy, we thought. And fuck whoever was in charge of hiring the fucking interns, we thought.
We found an open utility closet and hid ourselves there. We took stock. We had been shot, in the calf and in the shoulder, and one of us, nicked in the ear, the earlobe sheared off and smelling of cordite, which we made a point of saying out loud because we hoped the naming of the things that were tearing us apart might make those things less frightening. We huffed and bent over in pain and tried our damnedest not to collapse into a blubbering mess, but it was hard. It was very hard, and then we decided it was too hard, and one by one, we crumpled into ourselves and sobbed and cried out for our mothers, our wives, but quietly, because they might’ve been close enough to hear us, and that’s how we waited it out. We rode out the mess of our meltdowns and waited until we’d completely disintegrated, hoping that once that had happened, we could pull ourselves back together again because we were men, and being men, it was what was expected of us.
After we pulled ourselves together, we didn’t talk about what had just happened between the three of us. None of us mentioned the sad truth of the matter: that we were surely going to die there, if not there in that utility closet, then there, somewhere there at the Regional Office.