Night Rover

                                                           Night Rover

 

Sam Meadows pulled up alongside the ramp security camera and waved at the lens. He looked at his cell phone and in another minute, he would be late and written up by his shift supervisor.

“Security,” said the voice from the phone box.

“It’s me. Sam.”

The slow heavy garage doors opened and he drove into the loading dock, parked and moved swiftly to the locker room to change. Fernando was there, almost dressed and ready to catch a train home.

“Hello Meadows,” he called in that unpolished tone.

“Hey Fernando. Leaving?”

Fernando smiled and nodded distantly. There were a handful of foreigners working as security guards and Fernando was one of two who barely spoke a word of English. He slipped his backpack over his shoulders and smiled again.

“Goodbye Meadows.”

“Hey. Is Santiago in there?” Sam asked.

Fernando smiled again, opened the big door and was gone. Sam knocked on the adjacent door beside his locker. He pushed it open. The smell of stinky socks filled the small cluttered office. Santiago was stretched out on a recliner, feet up on the table. Though a movie played on his DVD player, his eyes were lidded. He looked up and recognized Sam. He held out his fist. Sam returned the gesture and their knuckles touched.

“What’s going on?”

“Fucking Bruins, man. Cost me a hundred bucks.”

Sam laughed. “Don’t poke the bear.”

“You know I got to write you up right?”

“Just put it in the never ending stack.”

Santiago laughed. “Call me if you see any food upstairs. I’m starving, man.”

Sam grabbed the keys from the table.

“It’s Friday. Probably a boatload of pizza and chicken somewhere.”

“Cool thanks, man.”

Sam returned to the locker room. He opened his locker where three or four new security shirts, still in their packaging lay at the bottom. He still wore his old one, yellowed with age on the shoulders and wrinkly as a sun dried onion. He buttoned it, left the tail loose over his ripped slacks and retied his sneakers. The rumpled white collar shirt hid the slacks that were held up with a belt made of romex wire. He had become lazy for sure, especially since his wife had left him, so lazy he hadn’t even bothered putting in an order for new pants. He was quite content to walk around in pajamas during winter and shorts in summer. Even though the overnight was generally a relaxed easy going shift, the eye in the sky was always watching. The security manager, Petrov, had been leaning hard on everybody because of general tenant complaints; so Sam tried to make the appearance, at least until things cooled down, that he was following the rules. His shift supervisor, Santiago didn’t care what Sam did as long as no one commented or brought it up to Petrov. He knew Sam was honest and always kept his eye out for his fellow workers.

It usually took a good six months before Petrov or his supervisors called for a camera review. Mostly reviews were random unless something had been damaged or stolen; in which case Sam might be seen passing through the garage by the central revolving camera, quite by accident, caught strolling across the empty parking lot in worn plaid pajamas, black sneakers, disheveled security shirt, headphones and I-pod tucked into his breast pocket. He waved at the camera— to the officer in lobby A or B, officers who were bored, nosy and restless and who often played with the lobby camera controls— zooming in and out, slowly or quickly or stopping outright on a passing body, incoming car or their own parked vehicle. As he strode quickly from one loading dock to the other, Sam would stop right in front of the camera and give it the finger. Then he would smile and disappear into the bowels of the garage. He knew how he looked but it was the overnight shift and with the depression consuming him, it was a wonder he wasn’t drunk too.

He had been the overnight rover for this company in this building for three years despite numerous changes in personnel and shift changes. Sam Meadows disliked security but it was a job after all and paid okay. His one saving grace: he enjoyed being the rover. His job was to observe the site, which consisted of two tall towers over four hundred feet tall and made up of thirty floors above ground and five below, those being the parking levels. It usually took little over two hours to complete his tour, including an outside perimeter check. He was given a hand held device— a thin black electronic wand called a Detex, which he used to tag or hit a hundred or so checkpoints that were scattered in mechanical rooms, vestibules and stairwells across the site.

He was alone most of the time. Once in a while he encountered a worker from Pepper Hamilton or Cantor Fitzgerald putting in some late night overtime but in general, five nights a week, he was alone on his tours. In his mind, he owned the towers. He loved exploring the building and office spaces, alone and the freedom to stop, rest or write in his journal, travel freely from one floor to the next and listen to his growing volume of I-pod music. On the other hand, it was a backwards lifestyle and unnatural. He slept during the day and was awake through the night. A complex vampire psychology had begun to manifest his mindset.

Now, he closed the locker room door behind him. He slipped on his headphones, dropped the I-pod into his breast pocket and draped his building identification badge around his neck. He headed back into the garage toward the ramp where he pressed a green button on the control box and strolled through the opening garage doors to start his nightly tours, first stop— the building perimeter.

Outside, the big story in Boston was the Bruins Stanley Cup victory over the Canucks and the city was crazed with joy. Atlantic Avenue was abuzz with traffic, blaring horns and crowds of fans stumbling from the Garden to area sports bars. A sea of Zdeno Chara shirts and playoff towels waved along the sidewalks; painted faces of black and gold flowed like banners. As Sam reached checkpoint after checkpoint, the people grew more belligerent. Some fought each other, others tripped idiotically into orange work cones and another person picked up a nearby potted plant beside the revolving doors of Lobby A and screamed, “Go B’s!” He threw it into the street and wandered off. Outside the firehouse the firemen from Engine 10 sat there on fold up chairs. They observed with amusement the drunken girls who stopped to flirt with them before stumbling off blindly, tripping over their high heels and barely avoiding belly flopping on to the street.

At 12:45 he took the elevator down to garage on P5, his usual starting point. It was a hot sweltering June night. There were no cameras on any parking level, except in the elevator vestibules. During summer, the lower parking levels swelled with humidity and in winter the cold air blasted through the garage doors, flowing like a river throughout each level to the bottom floor. The parking spaces were empty. Quiet filled the garage until the elevator banged to a start and responded to another level and where a solitary truck was parked by the stairwell, he marked his first checkpoint. He cut across an HVAC equipment storage area, loaded with Air Handlers and motors and loose parts. Overhead lights buzzed and lamps flickered. He climbed the stairwells and passed the notorious oil spot where a few select guards and supervisors smoked their weed. He went into a mechanical room; in the garage, they were always hot and smelled like urine. He skipped over the crosswalk where above him, a blinking yellow traffic light, in steady maddening ping-ping chatter blinked all night, all day and all year round. He moved past a huge fire extinguisher set in brackets on wheels in the event of a car fire. Along the short ceiling, dirty copper tubing and electrical pipes ran long straight distances, through walls, merged with others or angled off to other levels. He flew through the checkpoints. He finished off the fire pump and sprinkler rooms and ascended the final humid stairwell to the dock level.

Near the locker room door, a drunken man was passed out on the ground. Music played from his cell phone lying at his feet. Sam called Santiago on the radio.

“Rover to G-4.”

“Go ahead.”

“Santiago, buddy. You got company outside the office.”

“Who is it?”

“Someone very passed out.”

“A Canucks fan?”

“Need me to stick around?”

“No sir. I got this.”

“10-4.”

 Sam continued on to the service elevator and pressed the button. The doors slid open; he entered and tapped the button for the 30^th floor. He was always self consciously aware of the camera behind him in the top right corner. He leaned against the wall, just under the camera and cranked his I-pod again, currently scanning through his love songs playlist. Led Zeppelin reminded him of Angie and he thought about how things between them had worsened. Though still married, on paper, they lived apart. She had kicked him out of the house. Even before his addiction, he saw signs— small cracks in their relationship that he chose to fill with the casual use of percocates and alcohol.

After Sam was laid off from Sanders Sheet Metal, a company he had worked for ten years but had recently gone bankrupt, he was forced to take on the overnight security job to help support his two year old son, Sean. A year or so after he began Roving, he became addicted to pills as well. At that point he rarely slept and the drugs masked his fatigue and dissolved any drive he might have to get out of his situation.

The elevator opened to the 30^th floor and he tagged his first checkpoint beside the elevator panel. He climbed another series of stairwells, passed locked storage rooms and closets, until the stairs came to an end at a wall— where a ladder rose to a hatch outside the tower. To his right was a metal door. He opened it and walked outside on to the roof. A strong summery breeze swept across his face and he pushed forward. He stepped over massive steel rails that were used for equipment transfer and he cut along the building’s edge, mindful of the thin metal bars. The lights of Boston shone and twinkled below— all the way to Logan airport; the night covered the lightscape like an inky blanket. The view always calmed him. He looked out and gazed and the lights were like eye candy that fed his appetite and the surrounding vastness created a sense of union between the world and the mixed up life he lived. If he had more time, he would camp out there for the night with his feet up on the rail and a whiskey and coke in hand.

Time was ticking. He crossed over to the other side and pushed open the stairwell door to the second tower. He began his descent to the 29^th floor.  When he was geared up, he generally drove himself on quickly and with purpose, from the 30^th floor to the 2^nd, blasted his I-pod and nailed the tour less than forty minutes. Some nights, when he languished listlessly through the building, he was acutely aware of the loneliness that accompanied these graveyard hours. He was used to it— the constant dark, the solitude, the emptiness and it began to create a sticky mold around his soul. Sometimes the surrealness of the shift gave way to dark fantasies, where he was a character in a Doom video game, surrounded by one eyed Cacodemons that lurked around every corner waiting to take him out with deadly balls of lightning. Other times, wonderful memories of younger days filled him with inspiration only to be drowned out as he passed into another mechanical room, where warm thoughts were swallowed by the loud drone of commercial heat pumps. He would feel lost in the layers of dust, motionless, dark and grey. Each mechanical room, a black hole save for the twenty seconds it took him to flick on the light switch, walk across the room to the checkpoint and back; switch off and when the door locked behind him, the blackness was reunited with itself, whole again, shaking and choking over the din of scrolling compressors. Mostly his thoughts had little disturbance and drifted without detour or daily chatter to obstruct their free fall. Lately, many of them had been falling in one spot over and over.

All he could do was to keep fighting. After child care support and court costs, his wage barely left him enough to get by. He struggled on. He worried that he wasn’t spending quality time with Sean. Despite his selfish ways and flaws, his love for Sean never wavered. Though alcoholism ran through his blood and there certainly was no shortage of embarrassing moments— stumbling around buzzed on Jack and Cokes at Sean’s third birthday party or hammered at his Christening, the bottom line, in his mind was that, if a gun was placed at Sean’s head, Sam knew he could quit drinking— out of love for Sean; his own miserable life meant nothing to him anymore. Sam’s girlfriend, Monica, a fiery red head whom he met at one of Sean’s hockey games loved Sam too but, in the end, he knew that wouldn’t last either. Their lives together were on a finite course; nothing worthwhile ever seemed to last and Sam, though broken up about it, accepted his condition. In the end, there was no gun aimed at Sean’s head and no reason to get his life together. It was easier to just drift along numbly in the darkness.       

He followed fresh footprints down the stairwell for two levels before they disappeared behind an elevator control room door. Sometimes building engineers or construction workers tracked concrete or dirt in the stairwells. At Pompour Properties door, he shook the key ring until his finger and thumb held the 155 key. He slid it into the keyhole, jiggled the ring, and turned it until the key began to bend. He let it go, stuck in the keyhole. He fumed. He nearly broke the fire extinguisher glass, ripped it out and slammed the door knob until it broke the door handle. He counted to ten, slowly jiggled the key until the lock clicked open. He shook his head and entered the floor and sauntered toward the mechanical room.

19^th century oil paintings depicting maritime life lined both sides of the corridor— Schooners in battle and Clippers cruising across stormy seas, portraits of captains and sea monsters. Sam walked along a yellow and purple Persian rug, passed a bust, bathed in light and perched on a white rectangular box beside a bay window overlooking Boston towards the south. Its face had a strange pained expression. Sam didn’t know if it was a woman, man or for that matter, a fictional character or not.  

“Lobby A to Rover.”

Sam lifted the radio out of his pocket.

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Can you come down? Emergency code 18 in progress.”

He hated stopping the tours for bathroom breaks. It slowed down his momentum but it was the Rover’s job to relieve the lobby guards.

“How bad an emergency?” he asked.

“End of the world.”

“Fine, Lupo. I’ll be right there.”

He turned back and took the service elevator to the first floor.

He passed through the atrium, a grand open space with glossy scarlet walls, high ceilings and thick columns. A huge skylight invited the darkness. He sauntered by a painting that hung on the wall, the size of a movie screen, of an abstract city street and faceless commuters. His footsteps echoed and seemed to reverberate across the length of the atrium, beyond a cluster of coffee tables and chairs. At that hour, all three lobbies were dead quiet— a polar opposite from the morning onrush of bodies. He turned into Lobby A and waved at the camera above him.

At the guard desk, Lupo was already standing, waiting. He raced passed Sam and skirted around the corner toward the atrium bathroom.

“Don’t take forever,” Sam called.

He pulled up the seat. A soda can was on its side and a puddle of Pepsi streamed toward the camera control board. Candy and Doritos wrappers were scattered around Lupo’s laptop. On the floor beside the waste basket, his socks were balled up inside his flip flops. Sam shook his head in disgust, sat in the chair and rolled away. The smell of sweaty feet receded as he did.

As time passed, he began to feel sleepy, unmotivated. He stood up and wandered to the revolving doors. Outside, a crowd gathered in front of Biddi’s Place, smoking and talking. Above them, on the top floor, silhouettes wavered behind frosted windows. In the next apartment beside the frosted windows, young faces stared down on Pearl Street, drinking beer and laughing. He got an urge to leave post, join them and drink a whiskey. He was a college graduate and a licensed tin knocker. He never intended on becoming a forty year old security guard.

Lupo returned, slowly. He had the hand eye coordination of a zombie.

            “Sorry. Too many tacos,” said Lupo.

            “I thought you fell in.”

            Sam rose from the chair, grabbed the radio, Detex, keys and headed toward the elevators. He was too tired to finish the tour, at least for the moment. The elevator door opened and he pressed the button for the 6^th floor. The doors closed. His reflection on the brass plated door made him look pale and sick. The flesh below his eyes was a layer of crayon black. He stuck out his tongue. He realized he looked tired because he was tired and hung-over. He turned away from his reflection.

He missed autumn, for some reason, with its snowy red leaves all over the yard.

            The 6^th floor, PriceWaterhouseCooper. He scanned his identification badge across the card reader; the door clicked and unlocked. He darted toward the kitchenette where, off its side, was a waiting room, sofa and flat screen TV on the wall. A second couch was in the back, just off camera. This was where he took coffee breaks or naps. He felt comfortable enough that should an employee greet or question him, he could talk to them like a buddy and make them forget the fact that he was a security guard, not an employee who shouldn’t be hanging out, drinking their coffee and napping on their couches. At work, it was his fortress of solitude. He cut to the refrigerator, opened the bottom drawer to a full stock of Sam Adams. He snagged a bottle, walked to the back couch, stretched out, beer in hand, feet up on a table and watched the highlights of the Bruins game 7 win. He drank a gulp of beer then closed his eyes and rested. He felt the couch pulling, absorbing him like a sponge and knew he had better sit up before he fell asleep. He wrestled with his thoughts.

Just then, the emergency strobe lights flashed, over and over, a silent yet obtrusive overload on his senses, bolting him awake. He rose and shuffled over to the window; the reflections off the window made it difficult to see. It was raining hard now and a heavy fog had settled around the building but as far as he could see, the flashers were isolated on the 6^th floor. He picked up his radio.

“Rover to G-4.”

He walked into the corridor. The glass doors opened and closed freely. He pressed the elevator button and waited but none came. Maybe they defaulted back to the ground floor, he thought. The flashing stopped; PriceWaterhouseCooper turned dark. All the main lights were off too; emergency lights provided some light but the darkness was heavy. His eyes scanned the cubicles. He had an eerie feeling as if shadows were lurking nearby.

“Go ahead.”

“The emergency lights just kicked on. Any trouble down there?”

“No man. Nothing. I’ll put a call into engineering though.”

“10-4.”

Sam sighed. He felt for his key ring and headed back towards the muggy stairwell. He liked the exercise. He jogged up the stairs, breathing heavy, sweating until he reached Pompour Properties and this time, the key didn’t stick and the door opened easily.

“Come in Rover.”

“What’s up, Santiago?”

“I got nothing on the monitors. Probably just a glitch. I wouldn’t worry about it,” he said.

“Elevators aren’t working either. All right. Thanks.”

“Left a message for Property Management. 10-4.”

He thought about the morning. It would be day light in a few hours and he would be stationed at the garage ramp, watching the sunlight break over the collection of hotels and banks across the eastern horizon. Sometimes Monica would text him on his tour on those occasional sleepless nights and tell him sweet loving words and he would blush and fumble over his phone to text back that he loved her too. Tonight was not a sleepless night he guessed.

Sam and Monica had known each other from hockey camp. She had enrolled her daughter, Sean’s age, and who loved hockey just as much as any five year old boy. Sam and Monica became Facebook friends and would exchange humorous comments to one another on the public walls— light breezy jabs and quips. One day they started up real conversations, private ones about life, love and unhappiness. Suddenly they were real friends. Shortly after Angie kicked Sam out of the house, he and Monica met at The Lounge for drinks. By night’s end, they sat in his car making out like high school kids on a date.

As Sam walked across the Persian rug once more, he approached the bust by the window. In the dimness of emergency lighting it gave off a creepy, almost terrifying aura, as if it were a live entity trapped in a wooden box. Its smile no longer comforted him— it writhed in agony as if its soul had been dragged to Hell. As Sam passed, its piercing grey eyes raised the hair on his arms and he looked away. He felt it watching him. He knew it was just fatigue on his brain. He sped up anyway. He scanned the Detex marker in the mechanical room and on his way back down the corridor he darted straight ahead, head down, passed the bust and humming Enter Sandman from his Ipod.

 The next floor had been recently demolished and stripped to its core— the chipped concrete spaces were consumed with a strong mustiness in the lifeless air. Along the ceiling, exposed plumbing, air conditioning duct work, metallic wiring and spray insulation ran the length of the floor. The absence of the temporary lighting— 400 watt halide bulbs, typically attached to sensors on either entry had left the floor completely dark. There were no emergency lights either, only faint moonlight light coming through the windows and that was dissolving beneath approaching fog. He turned on his cell phone and used it as a flashlight. He scanned his Detex mark and walking blindly and nearly tripped over a fire extinguisher, abandoned on the floor.

He jogged down the stairwell and into the old Hoffman Publishing firm. It had been vacated for two years but still furnished with desks, cubicles and carpeting. The silence engulfed him deeply. He passed the secretary’s desk, now deprived of things that once made it personable— small plants, family pictures and vacation mementos. The black and grey shine of the desk matched the black marble floor. He pulled the brass handle on the glass door and felt as if he were walking through the detention area of the Death Star. As he turned the corner, his reflection on a mirrored plate moved across his body, opposite him, or so he thought, with a raised fist. He ducked and jumped away from the door. In a moment he laughed incredulously. He peeked into the mirror at a surprised and smiling face. He relaxed. Behind his reflection however, he noticed the walls were silently crumbling down, piece by piece the sheetrock fell into a heaping pile; then the metal studs fell like match sticks. He spun around. The wall was there standing strong, the sconce light fixtures firmly in place.

As he moved gingerly toward the mechanical room, he heard a faint clicking sound, like a rat-a-tat-tat until it gave way to sliding steps across the marble floor. He stopped. What the hell, he wondered— he had done these tours a thousand times, night after night and never a peep or disturbance. Now he felt like he was losing his mind. He tried shaking it off. As he headed towards the stairwell, he sensed the angry stare of his reflection, as if it were another entity, following him.

“I need a nap,” he whispered.

 

He had set his phone alarm to go off in 15 minutes and closed his eyes. The couch on the 6^th floor had been his “break” couch for three years. It was comfortable, off camera and in an area that he knew workers didn’t arrive until 6 and he was long gone by that time. 

Outside the wind vibrated the windows. Sometimes he thought he heard doors opening from nearby offices and his eyes darted nervously toward the entrance. What was wrong with him? Sleep had been a huge issue lately. He hadn’t realized how bad an issue it had become. Sleep masks didn’t help at all. He despised sleeping pills; they carried over once he was awake and driving to work. He used to drink two glasses of vodka, everyday which helped but sometimes the buzz kept him awake even longer. Nowadays he didn’t even track how much he drank. He just fed the beast repeatedly until he got drunk and passed out whether it was on the bed, the couch or the floor.

The winds picked up and the rain battered the glass. He rolled on to his side. On the carpet, a black furry spider crawled toward him. It blended into the rug but its round body was unmistakable. He sat up, turned on his cell phone light and pointed it in its direction but it was gone.

“That’s new,” he said.

He hadn’t seen spiders like that in the building. He had seen cockroaches and rats. Things always looked different at night, especially in the dark. Sometimes he talked to himself. He rose up. He turned toward the rainy window where a seagull stood, its beak inches from the glass as if watching him like a caged animal. Sam threw his arms to shoo him away but this angered the gull. It pressed its bill to the glass, squawking, raising its wings, making itself taller as if it were in an attack position.

“You win,” he said.

 The corridor lights flickered. Outside, the city lights were out too and the storm was picking up, rattling the windows now. The gull had disappeared into the fog where pointy shadows, moved into brief pockets of faint light. Black, shiny massive arms crashed and pulled on the building as if they had risen from the harbor. It was difficult to ascertain with all the rain and fog and distance.

“I have to get up,” he said.

He decided to forgo the nap, finish the tour and rest afterwards before he reported to the garage post. He came out of the stairwell and passed through a copy room where he was he was surprised once again, when he saw a scattering of people by the water cooler, milling about, backs turned to him. He paused, unsure if he should proceed or not. He had never come across a gathering on an overnight tour. They were standing, moving slowly, and shifting from side to side. From his angle it looked like they were in long black capes and head gear. Maybe it was a celebration party— after all it was Saturday night and the Bruins were newly crowned champs. A sense of relief overcame him.

He pressed forward down the aisle, offices on his left, cubicles on his right. Just then a figure popped out of an office, dressed in red cape, mask and hood. Sam stopped short as the tall figure cut him off, unapologetic. Sam was about to shout when he turned and glared at Sam. Through exposed areas of the mask, Sam cringed at such an evil smile and eyes that glowed like burning cinder. His face was splotched with burnt indentations and scabs like some distorted Halloween mask. It certainly looked real. Sam froze by the water cooler and the figure stared at him with tilted head, curious. He raised a finger in the air as a signal for silence and then turned away to join the others. After the shock of the confrontation, Sam decided it had to be an after hours costume party and he laughed and called himself an idiot for thinking otherwise.

He wandered through Morgan Stanley offices. He came upon a large section, blocked off with a tarp, taped to the wall during remodeling. The building Management logo was taped to the elevator along with a list of do’s and don’ts for contractors to follow. Though he didn’t particularly care too much for building management— those pompous phonies who made head scratching policy changes, out of boredom and who liked to flex their muscles to prove they were heavy weights; Sam felt obligated to watch the building. He was protective of his fellow guards, the lobbies and the building itself— not of any particular floor or company that leased it but in general. He took his tour seriously with eyes wide open.

As he passed the tarp, he heard a series of clicks, like computer keys. He paused. Should he go beyond the tarp and investigate? He knew this area was off camera; a quick look wouldn’t hurt. He ripped a section of tape off the wall, pushed open the tarp and looked in. Just then, something huge crashed through the ceiling with a loud bang. Through the smoke and rubble appeared a tallish figure, eight feet tall but with what looked like eight or more appendages. Sam was stunned and covered with rubble and frightened— and it was no joke or costume party but surreal and insane and he had no context on what to do. He cowered in the corner behind a job box under a haze of charred rock and smoke.

“Daddy! Help me. Daddy!”

It was Sean’s voice but his vision was too obscured to see. It made no sense. As the smoke lifted, his voice trailed off under a patter of feet. Sam was reeling with shock.

“Sean! Where are you?”

He picked up his radio from the floor but the battery had cracked in half. Was he just dreaming? He couldn’t differentiate between fantasy and reality. If only there was a test. If it were only a dream, he could sit there all night until he woke. If it was real and the building— or for all he knew, the planet was being invaded by these creatures and stealing their children then he had better do something about it. He had to save Sean and keep it from leaving the building.

He ambled to his feet and studied the gaping hole in the ceiling. It had crashed through 4 inches of solid concrete beside a huge I-beam. Rebar was torn apart like twigs. On the floor, distinct footprints trailed off toward the opposite stairwell. He had to decide: find Sean and stop the creature or do nothing and hope it was a soon-to-end nightmare. He reasoned that if he could make a conscious decision and was not a slave to a dream state then it was real, all of it, the shadows, reflections, and masked men. He knew what he had to do just not how to do it.

He took out his cell phone but the signal was dead, strangely for it always had good signal strength above ground. He slipped it back into his pocket. He decided, for now, to track and keep it close. He followed the trail into the stairwell. Chunks of stairs were missing or crumbled and the railing twisted at his feet; he jumped three stair lengths at a time. Sprinkler pipes were leaking at fittings and electrical circuits arched above doors. He moved slowly, tracing the path until the footprints stopped on the 15^th floor, the wood door smashed open in bits. Silence filled The McCormack Group. He opened the fire extinguisher door and grabbed the fire extinguisher. He carried it at shoulder level, prepared to throw it at first sight of anything. Most of the windows had been destroyed and the humidity, thick as sea water. The rain spattered the window sills. Three emergency lights were out but there was enough light that he could still see. Two exit signs hung precariously on the ceiling from a wire. Cubicles were torn apart and computer chairs, monitors and printers thrown all over the floor in chaotic mess. In the lobby, the check-in desk was missing, the entire desk, bigger than a grand piano had been removed, as if it had been simply picked up and taken away.

He turned a corner into a pungent wall of odor— like a stream of sewage mixed with stale wine, so disgusting he held his breath. The bathroom door was gone too and the toilets had been ripped off their pipes; piss and shit stained the walls beside a hole in the wall. Shattered tiles filled the area inside the wall and he carefully climbed into it, side stepping the tiles. He turned on his cell phone light but it only lit a few feet ahead of him. The inner walls and metal studs were dripping with condensation and the floor puddled along the side. The further he went, the softer the walls were, to his touch, as if the moistness was taking hold of everything until only water would be left. The condensation ran along the floor like a stream. As he lifted his foot to climb a small step, he fell through the floor and landed with a thud into a crate, the size of a coffin. A sink landed on top of the crate barely missing his head. He lay there, sweating and breathing heavy. He pushed but had no leverage and it pinned him down. He repositioned himself to the right and pushed with his shoulder. He wriggled his right arm free. Each time he heaved upwards, a flashing pain ripped through his hip. He rested a moment and noticed above him, along the ceiling, what he thought was a large spider web hanging across metal studs. He rolled back and forth until the crate began to rock, slow at first but picked up steam and on a final push, the sink slid off and splashed on the floor.

He sat up in the moist darkness, the only light, leaked through the hole he had fallen through. He climbed out and picked up the fire extinguisher. He followed a trail of sticky mucous and tip toed along but each time his foot pulled out from the thickening mucous, a snap like the sound of a rubber band echoed in the darkness. As he inched closer, a silhouette seemed to appear where a sliver of light broke through a crack in a wall. He crept closer and the mucous turned to glue and his sneakers remained stuck. He left them behind.

The monster smashed through the far wall and a burst of light momentarily blinded Sam. It entered the floor space, leaving a collection of tipped chairs, fallen cubicle partitions and mangled printers in its wake. Sam watched it closely; it walked on human legs, like any man but when it reached the windows that overlooked the city, it climbed the wall on eight furry spider legs that protruded from its shoulders and hips, jumped across the ceiling where tiles had been demolished and scattered in bits. Its abdomen bulged and gleamed like jelly. A dart of webbing shot across the ceiling; it latched to a copper pipe. He climbed across the single thread to the other side, shot another thread to original spot, climbed across again; it did this over and over, across the beams and plumbing. Sam was mesmerized by the orb construction— such beauty and chaos. He could not take his eyes off it until it made a low growl and dropped to the floor.

Sam heard sobbing from a nearby cubicle.

“Daddy, help!”

Sam’s senses were fully charged; his heart beat on edge now. The monster heard the cry and searched the room with a brief circular scan but could not locate the source. It bought Sam time. Sam turned and cut down another aisle, toward the sobs. His heart was ready to explode. If that thing even touched Sean, he thought, it would regret it. The sobs resonated and echoed in his brain so much that he nearly stopped outright and made the mistake of a wasteful useless charge on it without a plan. He stopped himself.

“How am I going to do this?”

In his haste he had revealed himself; the monster cocked its head at Sam. It moved toward him, hulking and slow. Sam held the fire extinguisher tight, ready to use it like a hammer on the monster’s head. He trembled. It got closer, uglier. Its scarred face smelled of rotting flesh and bulging insect eyes burned with hate. Saliva coagulated in a patch of fur around its mouth where sharp naily teeth chomped on excess webbing. It growled again, more menacing. It bore down on him. Sam lunged and the fire extinguisher, missed it completely. A right hook by the monster sent Sam hurtling across the floor, separating him from the fire extinguisher. Sam looked up, a little dazed and his shoulder burned. The monster’s growl had become almost a sinister guttural laugh. Sam couldn’t move. This was the end. Every dream he had ever entertained in his simple life would die with him. He would miss his chance to watch Sean grow into a man. Suddenly life seemed a little more important, at last, too late.

Sam noticed a two inch round copper pipe poking through a row of upended toilets. It was almost within reach. At the last second he spun, snagged the pipe with both hands and reached back for an all or nothing swing. The monster dodged the pipe; it jumped. Its spider legs attached to the wall and it crawled to the ceiling, before zeroing in on him like a shark on a seal. Its high pitched scream drilled through his brain; Sam rolled through the rubble, snagged the fire extinguisher beside the elevator shaft, released the lever and shot. It sprayed into its eyes and it fell helplessly like a moth over a flame, accidentally knocking Sam flying into the elevator shaft. He fell two floors and landed on the parked elevator, halfway below landing platform where there was just enough room for him to slip out. The monster moaned. Sam looked around for the fire extinguisher but it had been jarred loose above him and it never fell. He was defenseless again. He scurried away into Barclay’s Capital to think of a plan.

He scuffled up the stairwell, returned to Raymond James/ Main Spring Capital and stopped at the door. He listened. It was eerily quiet as if some horrible doom was waiting ferociously behind any number of office doors. He pushed on the door softly. He heard the labored breathing of Sean, now blanketed in a web where he had been hiding. Sam looked around and determined that the monster had left, at least temporarily. He ran to Sean. He picked up a long piece of glass and began slicing through the web. His hand bled from the grip. The web had a tough adhesive quality and took all his strength to cut. He picked up a notebook from the floor, tore out a few pages as gloves and continued slicing and bleeding. Once Sean was uncovered, he shivered weakly and sobbed. Sam hugged and cradled him.

“It’s okay. I got you. I’ll get you out of here. It’s okay, Sean.”

He heard the patter of spider legs getting closer. They made their hushed way to the stairwell and shut the door behind them. They shuffled down two flights of stairs and Sam stopped.

“Listen, Sean. If anything happens to me, you keep going down these stairs. Okay? You run and you run and don’t stop. When you reach the bottom, you will see a door marked P1. Go into that door. It leads outside, okay? You got it?”

“Yes daddy.”

Just then the door above them burst open and the blood curdling scream echoed in their ears. Sean screamed.

“Run now and keep running.”

He patted Sean on the buttock and he bolted away, reenergized by the fear of the monster. Only Sam stood in its way. Newly discovered anger lent him strength and was prepared to protect Sean at all costs as if ice ran in his veins and he was Superman, ready to challenge the world’s evil face to face. He stood, waited. He realized it was not Sean the monster wanted but him and had used Sean as bait. It followed Sam down and into Essex Investment where it seemed half the floor had been untouched. As he ran, Sam searched for any type of weapon and shook his head in dismay as he passed a fully stocked office supply room. Unless he could use a stapler against it, he moved on, much faster than the deliberate strides of the monster who seemed to be enjoying Sam’s fear, relishing, toying and prolonging his mental torture. It pushed a heavy oak book case against the exit, blocking the stairwell. It laughed, stood tall and listened for Sam’s movement. Sam ran along the south side windows and observed the next building only twenty feet away. The hooded creatures were dressed in macabre masks, dark hoods, costumes and gathered menacingly along the windows. They stared with satanic, ironic glares and chanted what sounded like muffled babble like an audience in a twisted gladiator game.

Sam circled the floor until he reached the opposite stairwell. It was cordoned off by tall, heavy file cabinets. He turned around, trapped. The monster lumbered closer. He searched in vain for a weapon. He ducked into a cubby hole behind a plastic palm tree. The monster’s laughter rumbled and shook the floor. It hovered nearby, scanning the cubicles. It thrust a partition against the wall, demolishing it and a column fell close to Sam. He remained hidden. He watched the monsters eyes— four black orbs like rings of wood. A white mucous coagulated around its mouth; fangs chattered violently. Sam squeezed into the cubby tighter. The monster punched the wall— ceiling tiles, wires and plumbing pipes rained down upon them. A steel pipe rode against his back, nearly stabbing him. He finagled to his right to free himself from it. The monster turned away. It swiped the wall again in frustration, shaking the pipe free from behind his back until it became detached. He picked it up slowly. In one swoop, Sam rolled out, and swung the solid two inch steel bat; it hit a spider leg, bending it back, perhaps even breaking it as it went limp immediately. The monster wailed and lunged at Sam, knocking him against the wall, stunning him again. He writhed in pain on the floor. Broken glass lay all around him. He bled from his face and his head throbbed. The monster pounced on him and began spinning web around his feet. He felt the pressure squeezing his bones as it spun higher toward his knees. He reached for a blade of glass and slashed at one of its eyes. It screamed and bounced a short distance away. Sam cut away the web and limped away toward the mechanical room.

The monster followed slowly, wounded. At the mechanical room door, the only door not blocked, he fumbled for the 155 key. The heaviness of the monster’s wound seemed to cause it to move slowly, as it slid in the debris. He inserted the key but it stuck; he twisted and turned and it clicked open. He entered and locked it behind him. He sighed with temporary relief. He moved through the small vestibule to another door, the mechanical room. The key opened the door on the first try. He was still trapped. He was sure the monster wouldn’t have much of a problem crashing through more steel and concrete.

The light was on. In the center of the room, a huge heat pump was running. Had the power been restored? The electrical panel door had been removed as if someone had been servicing equipment and had left for the day, a 480 volt live panel. On a shelf by the wall was a small collection of tools: tool belt, screwdrivers, pliers, wire strippers and a spool of wire. If he could fashion something with the spooled cable and the panel, maybe….  

He unrolled twenty feet, cut and stripped it back, quickly. The banging and destruction grew loud. The monster seemed to be voicing Sam’s name in a sing song ear piercing ring; it gave him the shivers. He stripped one end of the group of three wires. He found the breaker labeled heat pump, shut it off and popped it out with the screwdriver. He loosened the screws that held the three wires to the heat pump load, removed them and inserted the new wires into the breaker. He tightened them into place. He left it hanging temporarily and ran the wire to the other corner, the furthest distance from the door. He twisted the three ends together.

“Try this,” he mumbled.

As he held the breaker to return it to the panel, the monster burst through the door, like a banshee. He lunged at Sam but he ducked left, dropping the breaker. Sam scrambled for the wire but it got stuck on the heat pump. The monster snagged his feet and began webbing him again. He shook the wire, like a lasso to free it. A long fang descended from the its mouth, filled with poison to paralyze him, once and for all. He reached for the screw driver, threw it at its head; it bounced harmlessly off. Then the hammer— his last chance and he slammed it in the eye. It recoiled and Sam freed himself, long enough to crawl toward the hanging breaker and gather the twisted wire end. The monster began reinforcing the web. The fang pierced his shoulder and he weakened quickly. He was webbed up to his waist. In his drowsiness, he had forgotten about the switch and as if he were suddenly jolted awake, he stuck the wire into the monster’s mouth. He flipped the switch and BOOM. The heated explosion set the monsters face on fire and the body fell limp. The webbing melted away and he rolled from the heat and the white blood that oozed from its mouth. Only the light from the fire remained. The smoke smelled like dead flesh already. Sam stood up and kicked the body then for good measure, he struck it on the head with the hammer once more. As the fire dwindled, his vision grew weak. He heard the crumbling of the sheetrock and concrete and steel all around him.

As the fire burned out, the darkness returned and he closed his eyes. He couldn’t believe it. The scent of rotting flesh absorbed the oxygen. It was dead. Had the eye in the sky caught any of this on video?

He thought of Sean and how lucky he was to have one true beautiful thing in his life. And now he would have that chance to see him grow up. He was alive in a way he could not describe— as if he had been reborn and freed from a mental enslavement. The way things had been going with his general attitude and unwillingness to change his lot in life; he never thought he would come to terms with happiness again. As depressed and fatigued as he had become, life was a series of tests. He understood that now. He had the power now to alter things, change things, and not play the sad victim anymore. He was grateful for another chance.

He opened his eyes and was on the couch in PriceWaterhouseCooper. The power had come on at once— the lights, TVs and cubicle fans. The alarm had stopped. He looked around and found it strange that all the furniture and walls were in place. Had it been a dream? He wiped his brow. He saw the clock and hopped up. He must have slept through the night and hadn’t finished his tours. It was too late now. He had to hustle into the garage post.

He walked into the kitchenette to make coffee a quick cup of coffee. Just then, Monica bounced through the door. Sam was overcome with surprise and joy at the sight of her. She wore professional office attire— freshly ironed slacks, blouse and her pocketbook swayed at her side.  

“Hey. Monica. What are you doing here?”

She looked at him, cocked her quizzical head as if she had no clue who he was, like some complete stranger. He reached out to hug her, relieved to touch a familiar body and feel the safety of an embrace.

“Am I glad to see you,” he said.

She drew back and opened her mouth to speak. Her body began to shake violently, skin cracked open, bursting with new discolored flesh and she fell to the floor. Her eyes divided into a set of two. Appendages began to push out and grow like branches from her shoulders and hips. The transformation happened so fast he hadn’t time to think; he stood there shocked and awed. She pinned him down on the shoulders. As it wailed, a fang stabbed him in the chest. He went numb and sleepy and could not feel his head banging on the floor as she dragged him into a dark wet corner to web him and hang him from a beam like a side of meat.

He missed autumn, for some reason, with its snowy blood red leaves all over the yard. The crusted layers of new snow that covered the shallow pit where the pool once stood, before the pool rotted away and before his mother died.