Running Late

It’s 3 in the afternoon, and I’m running late for my board meeting with Mr. Shaw from BioCorp. I enter the elevator, looking at my phone. I jab the close door button repeatedly. The stainless-steel walls of the elevator reflect light and I can see a hazy image of myself in them.

“Come on, come on!” The door refuses to close. A hand appears. The hand belongs to a man in his late twenties with slicked back dark hair and a grey, primly pressed suit, and a red tie. There’s a pocket square to match. He embodies every bit the office professional.

“Shannon, hurry up, or you’ll be taking the stairs,” he says gruffly. A woman enters, her skirt that’s too short rippling with the movement of a half walk, half run. She appears out of breath.

“Jeffrey, you know Tiffany hates me,” she says, seemingly resuming the conversation they had started outside the elevator. “The goddamn CEO. How do you expect me to win her over? We need this deal. It’s vital real estate for the company. What if she says no?” Shannon moves errant strands of her hair out of her face, her red lips turn downward in an unmistakable pout. She looks younger when she does that.

“You tell her no is not the response you want to hear. Be assertive, Shannon. You don’t wanna end up making lattes at a Starbucks all day again, getting paid a measly minimum wage…Do you? Barely surviving off shitty tips? You need this. We need this.” He pulls her close with an arm which encircles her waist. Her hand runs down his forearm slowly. Sexily.

“What would your wife think of our little…office romance?”

“I really don’t care what she thinks,” he says offhandedly. He brings his face to Shannon’s and they are kissing noisily. It’s as if I don’t exist.

 I stand there silently, wishing the doors would close. My thoughts run wild in my head. Why weren’t the doors closing? Mr. Shaw is going to kill me. String me up, and then boot me to the curb. I could lose the house. The mortgage is due next week, and Debbie’s candle making business isn’t doing so well. The competition on Etsy and other sites was beginning to overwhelm her, and she just couldn’t really hold on much longer. She was already emotional because we lost our son, Daniel, only six months ago. I’m having trouble too, doing this damn corporate job day in, day out. I’m working 60 hours a week, at a minimum. The elevator doors slip closed, finally, and I jab the 65^th floor button. The man in the grey suit presses 45.

Shannon holds a handbag from which she withdraws a compact, and begins arranging her hair in the little mirror, slightly dusted with powder. I sigh heavily, and the elevator starts to move. My leg is cramping again, something that always happens when I get stressed. That happens nearly every day now. I’m always super stressed. Damn job. I’m going to start looking for other positions tonight when I go—

There’s a shudder of the elevator, and I cry out, grabbing the wall for support. Jeffrey reaches for Shannon. The lights flicker twice, and then go out. The buttons we had pressed are now dark. We are no longer moving.

“What’s wrong?” I sputter. “Why have we stopped?”

Jeffrey shrugs. Shannon looks at me, as if seeing me for the first time. Her eyes travel from my shoes to the top of my head, and she cracks a nervous smile. “Power’s out, I guess. Dammit! Now I’ll never get to see the CEO. She’s only available at set times of the year. She’s always traveling for work…”

Jeffrey shushes Shannon, holding up a hand. “Do you hear that?” he asks. No one moves or speaks for a long while. The sound is distant, but unmistakable. The sound of machine gun fire wafts to their ears like the rank smell of rotten meat. Short bursts of bullets, going everywhere. The tinkle of broken glass. Muffled screams. Barely audible, but evident.

“Oh my God,” says Shannon. “What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” I say slowly. I keep listening to the gunfire, my heart beating faster. Randomly, I instruct, “Hey, everyone check their phones, right away!” I pull mine out of my pocket. No service. Shannon and Jeff do the same. Their head shakes confirm they are in the same boat. Phones won’t work this high up inside an elevator shaft deep within the building. “We have no phone use. We are stuck in here.” My reflection in the steel shivers slightly, and I turn and begin pacing the small area behind Jeff and Shannon. I turn and then walk in a square.

“What about the emergency phone line? Those work even in a power outage, right?” She doesn’t wait for us to answer and moves to the little door beneath the buttons console. She opens it and picks up the phone.

“Hell—hello? Is someone there?” She waits impatiently for a response.

There comes a man’s voice out of the phone, into Shannon’s ear and into the cab. “Stay calm. We know you’re in the elevator. We’re sending a team of people to come get you. Just sit tight and—” The voice on the line is cut off abruptly.

“Hello? HELLO?” screams Shannon frantically. She makes a strange noise in her throat and drops the phone. “He was there, just now and then…Gone. What are we going to do, Jeff?”

“We might as well get comfortable. We’re going to be here for quite a while.” He takes off his suit jacket and pulls absentmindedly at his tie. Shannon looks like a deer in headlights and doesn’t move. There’s more small arms fire and people screaming.

“What if those guys with guns find us in here? What if they—try to kill us?”

Jeff replies, “They won’t. They have no idea we’re even trapped in here. How could they know? All we have to do is stay quiet and they won’t be able to find us.” He slides his body down the stainless-steel wall and pulls his knees up close to his chest. I just continue standing. Shannon stares at the phone she dropped, as if doing so would make someone appear on the other end of the line.

“You might as well sit down. Does anybody have a bottle of water? It’s actually hot in here,” he states flatly, sweat already glistening on his forehead.

“I do,” she says. She pulls a petite bottle of water out of her handbag. “This is all I have.”

“We have to try and make this last,” he says slowly. “We aren’t really sure how long we will be in here.” He folds his arms over both knees. Shannon sits down by the phone, near the door. I hover in the corner refusing to sit.

“We can’t go through the roof exit. It’s really not an exit, anyway. Those panels only open from the outside,” I say aloud, more to myself than my two companions. A jarring noise makes my head snap forward. A heavy object is striking the outside of the elevator door. Someone is trying to get inside.

“It’s them, we’re saved!” screams Shannon.

Another bang. Several more seem to shake the cab. The elevator door opens a crack. And then the muzzle of a gun appears. It’s a man, or maybe a woman, in combat fatigues, a helmet covering their face. This person starts yelling at all of us. It’s in a language I don’t understand. I look hurriedly at Jeff, his eyes are wide, scared. I can see that the elevator stopped between floors, but there’s enough of an opening for the combat fatigue person to kneel and aim the gun right at us, at head level. They gesture with a gloved hand rapidly. I think they are saying to come out.

Fatigues fires a single shot into the back wall of the elevator, incentive to get us all moving. We amble quickly out of the elevator. I can’t help but think how much safer we were in the elevator. Now, an armed gunman is making us walk. But to where?

The hallway floor is peppered with broken glass. Windows have shattered. I hear the sound of a helicopter. In the distance, I can see more people in fatigues running around, they all have weapons. What are they doing here? We get to a window, one that’s been shattered from the outside, the safety glass covering the hall carpet. Shannon’s eyes are wide, and there’s a run starting in her stockings.

Fatigues grabs Shannon’s shoulder and manhandles her over to the window. Fatigues shoves her out the window, her scream echoing as her body descends to the pavement below. I’m aghast. I freeze.

A man walks out of a nearby conference room and strides right up to Jeff. “Jeffrey,” he says. “How nice to see you again.” This man turns to Fatigues and begins speaking in that same language. It was strange that this man spoke perfect English with no trace of an accent. Fatigues moves away and stands by the wall, a radio buzzing with chatter in that foreign tongue. Maybe some form of Arabic? “Come with me gentlemen.”

We keep walking to the end of the hall. We turn into a room with a long table and several chairs around it. “Have a seat,” says the man. I look toward the doorway, and see that it’s now flanked on both sides by armed men. They hold their weapons tightly, ready to fire at a moment’s notice.  

“Now Jeffrey,” says the man. “All we want from you is the code to the safe deposit box in Geneva. We know you stashed millions in diamonds in the bank. You’ll give us the code, or your wife and daughter will die. You will give me the code, now.”

Jeff doesn’t move or speak. The man withdraws a gun from somewhere under the table.

“Give me the code, Jeffrey.”

“But who are all these people? These soldiers?”

“They’re from a terrorist cell. I’m the leader here. We want to upend capitalism in this place. We need the diamonds to finance our expeditions and upcoming activities. We have operations all over the area. The President, a woman, is speaking in a day or so. We will be there, your diamonds filling our coffers, and we’ll have that woman shot to end this madness. Now, to the matter at hand. Give me the code to the safe. I have your daughter and wife, and I will kill them. You have two minutes.”

Jeff breathes out in a huff. “O-okay. The code to the safe is… 2A936V8127X.”

The man takes out a walkie talkie, repeating the code back to someone. He waits. “Ah.” he says. “The safe opened. My men will kill your family now.” He raises the walkie.

“B-but-but, you said you wouldn’t harm them!” Jeff tries to get up, but one of the men holds him into his chair.

The man laughs. “I lied.” He speaks into the walkie, giving the order to kill Jeff’s family. Jeff is starting to come unglued. His face is beet red and he is sweating profusely.

“And you,” says the man with the walkie. “You’re going to do it for us.” His mouth forms a grim line. He gauges my reaction.

“Do…what?” I ask hesitantly.

“Take a gun and kill the President. You’ll be well hidden. We have what we need to get you inside. All you need to do is point and pull the trigger. Nobody will be able to find you. You’ll get away cleanly.”

“But—"

“But nothing. You’ll do as we say, or I kill you and get someone else to do it. Your life means absolutely nothing to me.”

“What do I get in return?”

“You get to live. You have no choice. We’ll burn your house down, destroy your car. Sell your identity on the open markets. Establish a laundry list of crimes and make you a wanted man. We can make your life a living hell. We know exactly what we’re doing. This is what we do.”

The next day, I killed the President. No one ever found me. I got away cleanly.

The strange men with the wicked agenda simply vanished, gone back to whatever place they had emerged from.

The country is in ruin, exactly what they must have wanted. They had done the same thing with others; forcing a person to shoot and kill members of the governing body—all to create chaos. All to upend everything. After I pulled the trigger, they left me alone. Seemingly. But they’re probably still out there, watching me. Just waiting for the next time to attack us. My life can never be the same again. Because now, I’m a cold-blooded killer.