“Great work Sam,” Sandy grinned, walking forward and shaking Samuel’s hand. “Do we have any estimated viewing figures?” She then asked the man on her team who wasn’t behind the camera, Eric scrolling frantically away on the tablet he held in his hands. As he started to show his producer the statistics, Austin walked forward, clapping Samuel on the back in congratulations.
“That really was fantastic pal, you did an amazing job.”
“Really?” Samuel asked, now filled with nerves about how he’d performed. “You think it sounded okay? You think I said the right things?”
“You said everything that could’ve been said,” Austin nodded. “It’s up to everyone else now to see how they react to it.”
“Uhh, guys?” The cameraman, Devon, had put down his gear now and was standing next to the window. “It doesn’t look good.”
Moving with Austin, Samuel stepped closer to the window and looked down. The crowd of people down below had become a mob, the news bulletin Samuel had just given doing little to calm them down and apparently having the opposite effect. People were shouting and screaming, throwing things at the Trident building in anger. Most terrifying of all, smoke was billowing out of the smashed windows on the ground floor, suggesting that something was blazing within.
“Oh jeez,” Sandy exclaimed. “This isn’t good.”
“Have they set this place on fire?” Eric asked frantically, craning his neck to try and get a better view of what was happening down below. “They can’t have.”
“I think they have,” Austin nodded. “Shit. Does anyone have a phone? Mine’s upstairs. Oh man,” Austin started to panic, as Eric handed him a cell phone. “What is his number.”
“What are you doing?”
“There’s this guy,” Austin explained as he slowly typed numbers into the cell phone uncertainly. “Brandon Williams. He’s the head of this security firm that was helping us. I just can’t remember his number,” he paused and held the phone to his ear, trying the combination he had just dialed. “Ah man. I don’t know what it is. I can’t remember it.”
“Okay,” Devon tried to take control of the situation. “Forget that. We need to get out of here.”
“Do you think we can still get down?” Samuel asked, reluctant to move any further forward to see what was happening outside. He could hear it all though. The angry shouts of hundreds of frustrated Americans, banging, burning, rioting. It was terrifying. They needed to get out of the building; he couldn’t believe how wrong that speech he’d just given had gone. And his face would now be recognized by everyone. All of a sudden, he had become the face of Trident. The scapegoat. The one that everyone would blame.
“We’ve got to get out of here.”
“Okay, agreed,” Sandy nodded, her persona having changed somewhat after the failure of her report. “Devon, get that camera and let’s get out of here.”
“Wait!” Austin stopped the group, just as they were heading for the stairwell door. “The last time I spoke to Williams and mentioned fire, he said to use the elevator shafts to get out. They’re fireproof, and they go all the way down to the underground parking lot. We should use them instead of the stairs.”
“What?” Samuel didn’t like the sound of that. “I thought the elevators weren’t working.”
“Not the elevators themselves,” Austin shook his head, heading toward the elevator doors. “Just the shafts. We can climb down. They must have ladders inside or something.”
“Why don’t we just use the stairs?” Eric argued, not a fan of climbing down a dark elevator shaft. “We should at least give it a try.”
“Yeah,” Sandy nodded, “this seems a bit much.”
“Go and check the stairwell then,” Austin encouraged, trying to open the metal doors of the elevator to see inside. “But if there’s a fire down there,” he trailed off, Sandy and Eric walking away and heading toward the main stairwell door. Samuel and Devon hung back, neither of them sure what to do. “Can you give me a hand?” Austin asked, struggling with the elevator doors. “We need to find something to wedge in here.”
“How come they stopped working?” Samuel asked as he moved beside Austin, remembering the elevators all being stuck on the nineteenth floor when he had been in the building. “Did you turn them off?”
“Yeah,” Austin grunted, his fingers just in the crack of the doors as he tried to prise them apart. “Didn’t want anyone just zipping up and finding us all. This is useless,” he sighed, dropping his arms by his side. “We need leverage.”
Just then Sandy and Eric returned, both of them with pale expressions on their faces. “We need to get out of here now,” Eric murmured, “this whole place is going to go down.”
“What is it? What did you see?”
Eric looked at Devon and visibly shuddered, the sight of the lobby and the stairwell burning in front of his eyes singed into his brain forever. The flames were almost at their doorstep, the fire catching at a terrifying rate. “The place is on fire. They’re trying to kill us all.”
“Find me something to leverage these doors open with,” Austin demanded again, realizing that the elevator shaft was now their only way out of the building alive. “I need something like a crowbar, or a long metal pole. Something that won’t bend or break if we put pressure on it.”
“What about the camera stand?”
“No!” Sandy was quick to shoot down Samuel’s suggestion, moving protectively to stand in front of the camera gear that Devon had put on the carpeted floor. “You
