ascent, he starts to push Ben over the side with the sharp edge of the bat. Ben feels a hot line of blood forming through his wet shirt. Pinned like this, unable to move, he knows he is about to die.
He sees Clarke’s raised boot coming at him and grabs it, twisting hard. Clarke screams as Ben lifts it – and him – over and out of the cradle. Leverage always wins over brute strength.
Clarke falls and slams onto the ventilator grating, where he lies stuck above the sucking fans. Ben watches as the lightweight aluminium safety bars slowly bend apart beneath his weight. Mr Clarke, senior supervisor, thirty years of faithful service in the private finance sector, is sucked into the grating, exploding as he hits the first of the fans. The supervisor’s remains hurtle around and up the ventilation shaft to his final destination.
The last of Clarke comes out of the steel rooftop chimney in a spectacular crimson fountain.
Miranda and Meera see Clarke’s minced innards rain down on the outside of the building. As the pulverised remains fall, something shiny and metallic passes them and bounces onto the roof of the atrium below.
‘Jesus,’ Miranda exclaims, ‘the key!’ She and Meera rush back to the stairwell. ‘There must be a service door onto the atrium roof.’
Ben is hanging onto the rising, still-tipped cradle. He looks up. If he doesn’t stop it, he’ll hit the top at incredible speed. He looks for the controls but finds only bare wires. It would appear that Clarke took the hand control panel with him when he fell. Ben can do nothing but wait to be flung from the cradle in the final crash.
Unless.
He sees, coming up, the broken window from which Clarke emerged. He is ascending at an incredible speed. He’ll have just one shot.
The gaping hole shoots past his feet. Ben lets go of the side of the tipped cradle and slides in through the window, just as he passes it.
16. FRIDAY 4:05PM
Meera and Miranda find Ben lying in the stairwell on the twenty eighth floor. It takes a minute to get him awake, but they succeed in pulling him to his feet.
‘We have to shut the systems down,’ he says.
‘Wait,’ says Miranda. ‘That means shutting everything down. Power. Lights. Air. The place will be sealed tight. You want to turn it into a big steel coffin full of raving maniacs?’
Meera shrugs. ‘It works for me.’
They head back to the top floor and room 3014. Miranda opens the master control panel and looks around for some way of disarming it. ‘This needs the female touch,’ she warns, smashing a steel chair into the system, which makes no difference at all. Meera stops her and follows the cabling to a DANGER: LIVE VOLTAGE box. She unclips the lid, overrides the protector panel and removes a water cooler tank, emptying the whole lot into the mains.
There are several small explosions and a lot of sparks, but the air system reroutes again and remains on, its gauges moving even further into overcompensation. Throughout the building, floor by floor, the lights go out and the windows darken.
Miranda stands up and brushes herself down. ‘Nice one,’ she says, sarcastically. ‘Terrific. This top was brand new. We can’t stop it. Now what do we do?’
‘Get the key back. Get the hell out.’
Meera heads off after the key.
17. FRIDAY 4:17PM
The directors watch as the mainframe diverts itself to keep running. They are panicked and still trying not to inhale the atmosphere, although it’s hopeless pretending you won’t breathe. ‘There must be some way to turn the damned air off,’ Dr Samphire insists.
‘Ultimately, it’s designed to reroute itself to an outside power supply if there’s a crisis. It can’t be turned off.’ This from the same smartarse director who was rude to him before. When this is over …
‘What you’re telling me is we’re fucked. That boy. He knew what was wrong. You have to find him.’
The other director looks disgusted.
The work-floor is a very different place now. The air is as thick and as murky as the bottom of a pond. The windows have automatically darkened, screening out the light. In the hazy beam of Miranda’s torch, lunatics flit past in various states of undress. The building is a heathen hell, where small fires burn on desks. The few remaining computers are smashed in. Some of the sprinklers are on. There are moans and screams in the dark. Bedlam was an oasis of sanity by comparison.
Ben is still suffering from the effects of his fall. Miranda searches for survivors. Hearing a whimpering sound from under one of the desks, she finds a battered but still-living friend.
‘June?’ She helps her out from the crawlspace. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I think so.’
They are heading for the stairwell door when Miss Fitch reappears in front of them, lurching out of the semi- gloom. Her hair is standing on end. She’s trailing a computer keyboard, and has sellotape stuck all over her, with scissors, pens, and other bits of office equipment hanging from her body. Her cut wrist flops uselessly. She’s covered in coagulating blood.
‘Where do you two think you’re going? Have you finished all your work?’
‘There’s no more work to do. It’s over.’
Fitch, with her good hand, plucks some fluff from her sweater in annoyance. ‘You know, ever since you came here, there’s been disruption and insubordination. All this is your fault. If you hadn’t started trying to upset the status quo, we wouldn’t be trapped in here now.’
June taps Miranda on the shoulder. Miranda turns around. The deranged staff from her floor are standing behind Fitch in a semi-circle, watching the pair of them. The weaker ones always wait for a leader to emerge. It pays to be on the winning side.
Fitch works the crowd. ‘You see what she’s done? She’s destroyed your careers! Why isn’t
The crowd surges forward, backing Miranda and June against the stairwell doors. The girls slip through, dragging Ben with them, jamming the handles shut on the other side with a chair leg – but it won’t hold for long.
Miranda, Ben and June intend to head down the stairs, but another group of Bedlamites, this one in the mob colours now adopted by the accountancy floor, are on the way up.
The trio are forced to go up, not down. They hear the noise of the angry mob below them. The doors are smashed apart with fire-axes. Miranda grabs the partially-comatose Ben and smacks him hard in the face, causing him to revive a little. They are forced to continue upwards as the doors below burst open, and the Workforce of the Living Dead attack.
Have you ever been in an office where there’s a hostile environment? Now imagine that times a million. And give them all weapons.
The angry lynch-mob, led by Fitch, Half-Swan and the remaining supervisors, move fast. Ben, June and Miranda whack them back, knocking them down only to see them rise again. They’re only just managing to stay ahead. Somehow they reach the directors’ floor and get inside, barricading the stairwell doors behind them. Two of the directors are still there.
‘If you’ve got any bright ideas about how to get out of here, now’s the time to suggest them,’ says Miranda. The directors look helplessly at one another.
‘What’s above us?’ asks June.
One of the directors looks at her as if she’s mad. ‘The roof, you stupid bitch. There’s no way down from there.’
‘Even if we could get back down,’ June tells Miranda, ‘we still don’t have the door key.’
‘Then we have to make our stand here.’
18. FRIDAY 4:28PM
As they speak, Meera has located the service door and is stepping out onto the glass roof of the atrium, which is still slippery with pieces of shredded Clarke. The key is lying on a vast, unsupported pane of cracked glass. As Meera ventures towards it, the pane starts to splinter like ice on a lake.
