Demise of the Living (6 page)

“Meeting room B1,” Stephen
said, giving a nod and a smile.

John watched them walk off to
their separate desks.

Sharon wasn’t an
attractive woman. She had a slim, gym-toned figure, but take away
the salon-pampered hair, stick on a pointy hat and some green face
paint, and she could do a passable impersonation of the wicked
witch of the west.

John looked hard at her. Under
the orange glow of fake tan was the crusty exterior of a
career-minded bitch. He didn’t know if on the inside she was sad or
lonely or just a centre of gooey pure evil like most middle
management he encountered.

She
’ll be gone in six
months
, John assured himself.

In his nine years of
office purgatory he had seen six managers come and go. Sharon had
lasted longer than most. Drafted in to revitalize a flagging
division, she had turned things around on paper. They were now
running a profit, but the real reason for that was the layoffs she
had instigated. John had seen the figures. A dozen colleagues had
been axed and the wage savings used to offset the poor sales. It
was a sleight of hand trick and one that would only be convincing
for a short while. But by the time anyone noticed, Sharon would be
in a new department and some patsy would be given the role here
just long enough to take the blame for an understaffed department
under performing.

John toggled back to the job
application opened in one of the tabs on his browser.

He briskly typed in his
employer’s information.

“
Reason for leaving” sat
there empty beneath the list of dates and inflated job roles with
grandiose-sounding achievements.

John thumped into the field the
usual spiel about challenges, working for a market leader, and
wanting to utilize his woefully undervalued abilities.

He pressed send and the page
hung, the only movement being a hypnotic little swirl in the
browser tab.

“
Come on,” he said,
staring at the frozen screen. “I don’t want to type that shit in
again.”

He toyed with the idea of
hitting the refresh button, but worried this action would
obliterate all his hard work, so he held off.

“John?”

Startled, John whipped round,
frightened he’d been caught.

“
Your internet down,
too?” Stephen asked, oblivious to why John looked so surprised. He
placed a hand on the back of the chair, throwing John back with a
jolt, and leant in.

“At least you’ve got something
up. I can’t even get that,” Stephen said, looking at the browser’s
busy symbol spinning around. He called across to Sharon, “Is the
internet okay with you?”

“It seems fine,” Sharon
answered. “Why, has John got a problem again?”

Stephen lifted his hand from
the back of the chair and John jolted forward.

He sauntered over to
Sharon’s desk. When he got there he didn’t push her chair down; he
pulled up another chair and again sat far closer to her than John
felt appropriate.

There was a soft
conversation and Stephen pointed at something on the screen. He
smiled and stood up.

“It’s not just you, John,”
Stephen said. “We’re all in the same boat here.”

“I thought you said yours was
fine, Sharon?” John said.

“Oh, I was looking at the
intranet,” Sharon replied.

John clicked onto Portal, the
company’s internal web pages. An arty montage of smiling employees
doing different yet equally important rolls popped up on
screen.

“
Yeah, I can look at the
company’s own internal web pages, just nothing online,” John said.
He double-clicked the icon that launched their database front end
and the web-based application sparked to life. “It’s not going to
impair productivity though. We still have the intranet and I’ve
just booted up Finesse.”

“Oh, Finesse works,” Sharon
said, a note of surprise in her voice.

“Runs off our own servers, so
we can still make outbound calls and take orders.”

“Yeah, but external email will
be down if the Interweb is down,” Stephen said.

John hated Stephen for
calling it the
Interweb
. It was puerile and once
someone had said it one time it wasn’t funny anymore. More
irritating than that was the fact that Sharon had started calling
it
Interweb
, too.

Stephen was worming his way in
with her. When she inevitably moved on, John was in no doubt
Stephen would wangle his way out with her.

“
I’ll get onto IT and try
to find out what’s going on. We can’t afford a down day—not with
the level of sickness we’ve seen in the past week,” Sharon said,
picking up the phone.

A screech followed by a
loud crunch made all three of them look to the office
window.

Chapter
3

Colin jolted forward. The
book and phone on the seat next to him catapulted at speed,
smacking against the glove compartment. Then there came the
explosion and something grabbed at him.

He gasped and a membrane of
fabric was sucked into his mouth. Fearing he may be smothered he
lashed out with his hands.

The airbag reluctantly started
to deflate, allowing Colin space to see over its shroud.

He looked out of the cracked
windscreen to see a second car firmly embedded in his own. The
airbags had deployed in the other car, too, but hadn't yet deflated
enough for Colin to see the other driver. He pulled the handle of
his door and a spark of pain bolted up from his wrist. Pulling his
hand back, he rubbed at the joint, trying to feel for the source of
the pain. As he did he became aware of the ache in his other wrist
and running across his shoulders.

“
Whiplash,” Colin
mumbled. “Just great. The full summer holiday ahead of me and now I
have whiplash.”

More cautiously so as not to
aggravate his injuries, he undid his seatbelt and slipped out of
the car.

Standing up he could see the
damage more clearly.

He barked, “Crap!”

The colliding car had
penetrated a full foot into the passenger side of his.

The driver’s door of the other
car was opening. A woman in her early thirties stepped out, hair
wild and dishevelled, wearing a floral summer dress with strange
red smears across the front of it.

“Lady, what the hell were you
thinking?!” Colin shouted.

The woman ignored him and
instead opened the rear door and bent in.

“You got insurance?” Colin
asked. “I bet you don’t.” He shook his head. “Just my frigging
luck. Hey lady, are you even listening to me?”

Colin walked up to the woman,
who was bent half over the rear passenger seat.

She stepped back, cradling a
young girl.

Colin blurted, “Oh, Christ...I
didn’t realize.”

“Melissa? Melissa, are you
okay, honey?” Liz asked.

The girl was sobbing and
appeared dazed.

Liz stretched an arm over and
tapped her son on the thigh.

“
Grant? Grant?” she
said.

The young boy slowly
turned. Blood was cascading from his nose. He wiped a hand across
his top lip and looked at the blood-smeared skin.

“
I’m bleeding,” he said,
as if disappointed.

“
Come on, kids. We have
to get out of the car,” Liz said in as confident a tone as she
could.

She then became aware of a
voice behind her.

“Can I help? I’m a first
aider.”

Liz turned, feeling the
growing crick in her neck, to see a young, well-built man. He was
dressed casually in a pair of summer shorts and a T-shirt with some
trendy Japanese characters and stripes of clashing
colours.

“
You can check out Grant.
He’s bleeding,” Liz said.

“
Okay.” Colin scuttled
round the back of his car and up to the boy’s door. Opening it, he
said, “Hi.
Grant
, is it?”

The boy nodded, blood oozing
from the fingers that covered his face.

“
I’m Colin. I’m a first
aider. I’m going to help you. Okay?

The front door of an office
block flew open and a security guard came jogging over.

“
You people all right?”
the guard asked.

“You got a first aid kit?”
Colin asked.

“Sure, I’ll fetch one. I’ve
been trying to call for an ambulance, but the line’s busy.”

The guard turned and jogged
back to the office.

“
Okay, Grant, can you
pinch the top of your nose like this?” Colin said, demonstrating
the action.

“
Tip your head back,
honey. That’ll help,” Liz called over from across the
seat.

Colin could see that the mother
had managed to get her daughter out of the car.

He said to Grant, “No,
son, keep your head forward. We don’t want you swallowing your own
blood; it’ll only make you feel sick. We want to stem the flow of
the blood so it can clot naturally.”

It had been a few years
since he’d taken his first aid course. Now that the rare event of
having to use it was actually happening, he didn’t feel as
confident as he was during those workshops.

There was the pounding of feet
and Colin looked round to see the security guard return with a
green plastic box in his hands.

“
What do you need?” he
asked.

“
Um, I think we’re okay
here. Maybe just a tissue,” Colin said, looking at the young
boy.

“
You okay, ma’am?” the
guard called over the top of the car at the woman.

She was looking off down the
street, as if in a daze.

“It’s them,” Liz said.

“Sorry ma’am?”

“It’s more of them,” Liz said,
staring off down the avenue.

“
More of
who
?” the
guard pressed. He started walking around to the rear of the
car.

“Get back in the car, Melissa,”
Liz said.

She closed the door behind the
young girl, all the while looking back in the direction they had
come from.

Liz flumped in the
driver’s seat and closed the door, never breaking her
gaze.

Colin watched the back of her
head as she turned the keys in the ignition.

“
Lady, don’t do that,” he
said.

The woman ignored him and
continued turning the key. The starter motor screeched and
wheezed.

“Lady, it’s not going to
start,” Colin said.

The car still whined and
coughed.

“Lady, please stop that—you
could start a fire.”

Colin glanced up at the
security guard, looking for support. The guard nodded and opened
the driver’s door.

“
Ma’am, the car’s
busted,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere.”

“We’ve got to get away,” Liz
said, shaking her head. “Okay children, let’s go.”

“Go where?” Melissa asked.

“We just need to get away from
here,” Liz replied.

Colin stood up from his
crouched position tending to the boy. He placed a hand to his
forehead, shielding his eyes from the warming sun.

Down the street were three
people. They moseyed up the middle of road, not caring for any
possible traffic.

“Who are they?” Colin
asked.

“
Were they chasing you,
ma’am?” the guard asked.

“Come on, let’s go,” Liz said,
ushering her children from the car.

“
Maybe we should talk to
them—get their take on things?” the guard said hesitantly as he
watched the silhouettes draw nearer.

“
Look, you can’t just
go,” Colin said to the mother. “At the very least we need to swap
insurance details. If you don’t, I’ll have to phone the
police.”

The security guard called
out to the approaching group, “Hey, you guys involved in
this?!”

Colin turned from watching the
woman scurrying away with her children. The security guard was
walking towards the people down the street.

He furrowed his brow, trying to
make them out against the glare of the sun. There were now five or
six figures staggering towards them like drunks.

“
What’s going on, Gary?”
a woman’s voice echoed down the street.

Colin looked around but
didn’t spot the source until he looked up. The office building the
guard came from had a first storey window open. From it a woman’s
head poked through.

“
I’m not sure,” Gary
called back. “There’s been a car crash and the lady says these
people are involved.”

“
Just call the police and
be done with it!” the woman called down.

The guard looked like he
was about to retort, but then held back.

“
Yes, ma’am,” he said,
reluctance heavy on his voice.

“
God,
no
.”

Colin turned round again,
caught in a verbal game of piggy-in-the-middle.

“
Back to the car,
children.” The woman was now directing her kids back to the
wreck.

Just turning onto the other end
of the street was a second group of drunken figures.

Colin scratched his
head.
What is going
on?

He put his hand in his pocket
and fumbled for his phone. Not finding it there, he patted himself
down.

Car
, Colin realised and went back
to the car to retrieve it from the foot well where it had no doubt
ended up after the crash.