It Could Have Been Worse — Nobody Died

IT COULD HAVE BEEN WORSE — NOBODY DIED

“They don’t pay me enough to put up with this shit!”

EARLIER THAT EVENING:

I’d come on shift as usual. Because I’m the low person on the hierarchy scale, I work straight nights, midnight to eight, Wednesday night to Sunday night. Goodbye weekends, goodbye parties, goodbye social life. But I’m not complaining. This is my perfect job for this point in time. It gives me eight solid hours of study time. Well, close to eight hours. I still have to sign people in and out, and cover the other guard, Jerome’s, breaks — half an hour for lunch, and two fifteen minute breaks. But other than that, I’m golden. My time is my own. Jerome does most of the walking around, and I monitor the CCTV.

I’m attending university, full-time, in the psychology program. My classes are mostly during the day, with a couple of evening classes every once in a while. An overnight job that doesn’t involve me having to clean anything is perfect for me. I get pure, unadulterated study time. Although I’m not, technically, supposed to bring my reading and course assignments to work, I do. I smuggle in my laptop, and I have the joy of working without any interruptions. The building is pretty dead at night.  

Watching the monitors is a breeze. Because they are mostly static, I quickly notice any movement. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s just Jerome walking his rounds, but I’ve seen a few things. Like people doing things they shouldn’t be doing — like hooking up, getting drunk and throwing up, stealing, fighting. All manner of bad behaviour. But nothing like last night.

*****

“Hey, you see the memo?”  

Jerome had just come on shift, and was checking his phone.

“What memo?” I asked.

“The one about the construction tonight.”

I seemed to remember, vaguely, that there was something happening in the subway tunnel that ran under the building, maybe. I could be wrong. I didn’t pay that much attention.

“Refresh my memory,” I said.

“Okay … blah, blah, blah … drilling a new tunnel below the building … midnight to six a.m. … expect noise and vibrations … turn off motion detectors in all offices.”

“Right!" I said, snapping my fingers. "Tonight’s the night they start boring out the new tunnel for the A Line.” I looked at Jerome. “I hope the tenants remembered to turn off their alarms.”

The majority of the tenants have their own personal security systems in their offices, in addition to building security guards. Most, if not all, have some sort of motion detector, with their own security cameras. Jerome and I are only responsible for the public areas of the building. We can enter the offices, but we need permission from the tenants. 

Our building is a medium-sized, fifteen storey office building, with three levels of underground parking. Anyone using the garage has to enter the lobby before before being able to take the elevator or stairs to any of the suites, for security reasons. We can't have randos wandering around the building. There is no elevator from the underground parking structure, just one set of stairs that dumps you into the foyer, where they have to pass through security to get to the other floors.  On the night shift, Jerome is expected to walk through all three levels of parking at minimum, three times a shift.

Jerome looked at me, a bit of cynicism creeping into his features. “I bet we’ll have—” he thought for a moment. “At least ten alarms go off because tenants forgot to turn off their alarms.”

We had over forty tenants in the building. Jerome figured at least a quarter would have forgotten to disarm their alarms. That seemed too probable

“I’m not taking that bet, Jerome,” I said. “But, you better have your keys and entry codes with you, ‘cuz we’re going to be busy.”

And we were. There were eleven businesses that had set their in-house alarms, contrary to the reminder memos, and we had to respond to them all — Jerome having to enter all the suites and reset the alarms; me at the desk fielding calls from the companies that had been notified that their alarms had been triggered, the alarm companies, and the police.

But on a positive note, all that occurred during the first ninety minutes of the shift. After that it was peacefully quiet. Until it wasn’t.

The first inkling that something was wrong occurred about two-thirty. I was reviewing my study notes — midterms were coming up, and I wanted to be ready. I noticed a movement at the bottom of the screen in the basement, just cutting through the corner of my screen.

I wasn’t sure what I had seen, just that I had seen it. I picked up the company phones that we use to communicate, and punched in Jerome’s number.

“Hey, I think I saw something in the parking lot, first level.”

“What? A person?”

“No, I don’t think so. I just caught a glimpse on the bottom corner of the screen.”

“Want me to go down and look?”

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

Just as I said that, there was more movement on the screen. It looked like a dark rope moving across the bottom of the screen.

“Shit, Jerome, there’s something down there!”

“I’ll be right there.”

The movements continued across the screen. In the dark I couldn’t see exactly what I was seeing, but it sure looked like animals. Or a super long snake. Whatever it was, it wasn't supposed to be in the parking garage.

I heard the elevator ding, and Jerome strode over to my desk.

“I saw it on this one.” I pointed to the monitor on the bottom left of my array. Because we have almost fifty cameras throughout the building, and I have ten monitors, the different cameras rotate through the ten monitors, each location staying on the screen for about fifteen seconds. I have the power to isolate any one camera, and lock it in. I did that with the underground parking lot camera closest to the stairwell door.

As I pointed to the screen, more movement.  

“What should we do?” I asked.

Still looking at the screen, he said, “Go see what it is.”

Of course we were going to see what it was. In the car park. At night.

I swivelled the sign-in book forward, and put up my sign “Please sign in/out” on the open page, with a pen. I grabbed my flashlight and my phone. We headed to the door.

As Jerome opened the door, he turned to me. “You stay here. Keep the door open. If I need help, I’ll call up.”

With that, he disappeared down the steps.

Even in the bright light of day, I don’t like the parking garage. It’s dark, dirty, and smells like gas and oil. It echoes and there’s always water dripping from somewhere. I do not like it, at all. It’s just too creepy. Jerome knows this, and will always do his garage walk-through just before his lunch, so that I don’t have to do it.

I was thinking about that, when Jerome called up.

“Ohshitohshitohshit!”

“What?” I yelled down.

“Ohshitohshitohshit!”

“Jerome!’

“Ohmygodohmygodohmygod!”

“Jerome!”

“Ohfuckohfuckohfuckohfuck!”

“I’m coming down!”

I started down the stairs.

They started passing me about a quarter of the way down. Rats. Lots of rats. Lots of big brown rats. With long pink tails.

What the hell?

“Jerome! Shut the door!

“Ohshitohshitohshit!”

I turned on the steps and started racing back up the stairs. I’d left the door propped open. Of course I had. Now we were going to be inundated with rats!

I got to the top, and yanked the door shut. But not before a dozen or so rats had made it through the opening, and into the lobby. But, that was a problem for future me. Right now I had to go help Jerome.

“Jerome!” I yelled, “Shut the door!”

“Shitshitshitshit!”

I rushed down the stairs, and stopped. Jerome had managed to climb up on the handrail. He was standing up, holding on to the cage around the lightbulb. His eyes were fixed on the rats swarming around open door to the car park.  

It looked like a scene from that movie Willard or Ben — the one with all the rats. The ones that couldn’t get through the door at the top of the stairs were streaming back down the stairs. The ones that didn’t know they couldn’t get into the lobby were running up the stairs. There were dozens of rats.

I started shooing them back into the garage. I am not a rat wrangler, and I was only moderately successful. When I only had couple dozen rats in the stairwell, I shut the door, and turned to Jerome.

“Come on, Jerome. Let’s get you up into the lobby.”

He looked at me. His face was pale, he was hyperventilating. Sweat beaded his face, his eyes were huge, fear coming off of him in waves.

“I can’t.”

“Yes you can.”

“I can’t. I hate rats.” He looked from me to the rats and back at me. “I can’t do it.”

I looked at the rats. They were frantic, trying to find a way out of the stairwell, but they were leaving both of us alone.

“Jerome, buddy, you can’t stay here all night. You either have to come upstairs with me, or go into the garage. I don’t think that you want to go into the garage, right.”

He shook his head.

“And I don’t think that you can crawl up the handrail all the way to the lobby.”

He shook his head.

“Okay, so we’ve got to walk up the stairs to the lobby, and call the boss. He’ll know what to do.” I looked at him, and smiled. “Do you think that you can do that? Can you walk up the stairs to the lobby?”

“But the rats.”

I thought for a minute.

“Tell you what — I’ll go first, and you can follow me. I’ll make sure that the rats stay away from you. If they’re coming down the stairs, we’ll just walk on the other side, away from them.

“I don’t think I can do it.”

I smiled again. “They aren’t bothering me, and I won’t let them bother you.” I held my hand out for him to grab. “I promise.”

He put his hand in mine, and jumped down from the handrail. We started up the stairs, tentatively at first, then faster. Once Jerome realized that the rats didn’t care about him, he moved faster. When we reached the top, there were four big rats trying to get through the door. I used my boot to pushed them away. We squeezed through the door.  

“I have to warn you, there are maybe twelve rats that escaped into the lobby.”

Jerome looked stricken.

I put on my “the rats aren’t going to hurt you” smile, and said, “The lobby’s huge. You’re going to be fine.”

“Fine,” it turned out, was Jerome sitting on my desk with his feet up off the ground, and on my console.

I called our boss, who was not impressed with receiving a call in the middle of the night. But he arranged for some pest control company to come right over, and deal with our infestation. It was almost six o’clock in the morning when all of our little furry friends had been rounded up and taken away.

Jerome apologized to me for freaking out. "I just hate rats," he said, looking extremely embarrassed.

“It’s no big deal,” I said. “I’m your partner. I’ve got your back.”

He explained that as a kid, he’d playing in the yard, and had fallen in a well on his grandfather’s farm. It wasn’t a deep well, but it was too deep for him to get out. He was all alone, just him and the rats. He said when they found him, he was almost catatonic with fear.  

“I feel like such an idiot,” he said.

I shrugged. “No worries,” I said. “If they’d been spiders, I would have been the one climbing up the handrail.

He shook his head.   “There were so many of them. Where the hell’d they come from?”

“Well,” I said, “I was talking to the pest control guy, and he told me that when they were drilling the tunnel for the new subway, they disrupted some sort of colony of rats. There were hundreds of rats, and they all scattered. They made it into the parking garage through the air vents and the sewers. All the buildings in the area were overwhelmed by the rats.”

“They don’t pay me enough to put up with this shit!”