It was a management system not that dissimilar to the one currently in place at Trident. The CEO was Claire Manning, earning her place at the top by having it handed down through her family over generations. Samuel had met her once or twice, but both times had remarked about how flippantly she treated her employees. She wasn’t very well liked within the company, no matter how hard she’d worked to get there. In fact, it had been rumoured in previous months that her younger brother was due to take over from her, though whether that was something she’d known or not was another question. Either way, neither of the Manning siblings would have a company to control shortly, unless something changed with Trident very, very soon.
With this thought on his mind, Samuel hit the redial button on the screen in front of him again and willed someone to pick up the phone. Words hung on the tip of his tongue, ready to pour out if someone answered his call, but the moment never came. Irritated, he huffed as the call went to voicemail again, his calls being well and truly ignored by everyone inside.
“Alright then,” Samuel muttered to himself, revving the engine of his father’s Mercedes. “Let’s just get this done.”
Picking up speed, he found a clear bit of road and took advantage of it. The speedometer in front of him climbed through the fifties and into the sixties, well above the limit for the stretch of road he was driving down. Brooklyn Bridge came into sight ahead of him and Samuel tried to remember how passable it’d been; he veered onto it just below sixty-five and was forced to slam on the brakes when he took in the carnage ahead of him.
The bridge was a mess. The sound of horns blared through the air as countless cars tried to cross it, navigating the abandoned ones or those crashed up against the barriers. The closer that Samuel got to the city, the more chaotic things seemed. He could only imagine what it would be like at Trident now, the building right at the center of this disaster. Biting his lip, Samuel tried to figure out what to do and just in time, he switched the Mercedes into reverse and backed away from the bridge, narrowly avoiding hitting another car that was also trying to make it back into the city. There was no way anyone could drive across – abandoned cars sat within the mess of traffic and obstructed any clear way through. Cursing his poor luck under his breath, Samuel drove a little distance away from the bridge, found a relatively quiet place to park his father’s car and started to walk into the city. He hoped that the Mercedes would be untouched when he returned to it, but knew his father would eventually get over the loss of his car. It wasn’t like he didn’t have another two inside his garage waiting for him.
It didn’t take long for Samuel to notice that emergency services seemed to have been finally encouraged into the city to try and put a stop to the madness. But their numbers had been considerably depleted and they struggled to make a difference against the reluctant and unruly citizens of New York City.
As Samuel stepped down from Brooklyn Bridge, knowing he was just ten minutes at most from the Trident building again, he noticed plumes of smoke billowing into the sky from various points around the city. Small fires burned in corner stores or in houses, the vandals who had let themselves loose during the chaos terrorizing the city. People screamed and ran in the streets, while others huddled on corners, trying to avoid being caught up in it. Beyond that, Samuel couldn’t ignore the bodies lying lifeless in the street, one of them surrounded by a particularly large red puddle. It wasn’t only money and wealth that the city had lost, but all its laws and regulations, too. With no one to maintain law and order, society had very quickly turned on itself.
Turning the corner that took him away from the river, Samuel stopped dead in his tracks when he saw a police officer on the ground, straddling a young man and struggling to remove the crowbar from his hands without getting hit. The man on the ground looked early twenties and ready to strike, barely being kept still by the officer who was clearly one of the few that had stuck with their job rather than abandoning all hope and reason. A convenience store window was smashed just a few feet behind the pair of them, clearly the reason behind the attempted arrest.
“Get off me you pig! Let me go!”
The cries of the criminal carried down the street to Samuel, who remained frozen in place on the corner. On any normal day, there would be any number of additional police officers to back him up. But this was just one cop and one kid who had no respect for the law or the city. Samuel knew he should intervene and help the officer, stop the young man from getting away with what he had done. But he also heard his mother’s voice in his head telling him to stay out of it, and his own voice telling him to get to Trident. Using them both as an excuse, he looked away and continued walking.
The disaster that was plaguing New York City was very quickly giving him an insight into what sort of man he was, and while Samuel had spent his entire life thinking he was a gentleman, he was now thinking quite the opposite. He was ashamed of his behavior and he knew he should be making better choices, but each time he did something selfish, he found a way to explain it away to himself. In essence, he was doing what most people did every day of their lives;
