“What do you see?”
The earpiece crackled inside the airtight helmet. Kristy jumped – it was the first time they’d made contact with her since she’d been outfitted earlier that night. She looked around the darkened hall. The only sound was her breathing.
“Nothing to report. No signs of movement down here. I’ll switch on my helmet cam.” Kristy fumbled with the switch on the side of her helmet. There hadn’t been time to practice much in the suit, and the gloves left little room for movement. She was hardly strong enough to flex the fingers.
When she found the switch, the glass visor flickered momentarily and a red light came on in the corner of her dash. The entire command room could now see what she saw. She began to walk forward.
As she moved, the same voice spoke. “All security has been disabled. You should have no problem getting through the biometric-sensors.” The voice was deep and authoritative. Kristy tried to match it to someone she had known before, but too much time had passed. The people on the other end of her radio were powerful. That was all she needed to remember.
When she reached the scanners, she could see that they had been disabled, and the sliding doors they controlled were wide open. “I’m entering the premises,” she said, half hoping someone would tell her to turn around and go home. Instead, a second voice stepped in. “Proceed.”
The suit restricted any movement above a shuffle, so the hundred feet to the elevator shaft took almost five minutes. The six terminals stood silent, their panels dark. “Which should I take?” she asked the control team. “Are any of these even running?”
A younger, nasally voice began to speak. “We overrode the mainframe, so they should be fully operational.” The man’s optimism wasn’t inspiring, and she told him so. “What he means to say” – the first voice cleared his throat – “is that all of the elevators are fully under our control. And they are all fully operational. Take terminal A.”
At that, the doors opened and a metallic bell rang throughout the hall, making Kristy jump in her suit. She leaned on the doorframe and peered inside, her feet still firmly on solid ground. “Like I said, fully operational,” the first voice again. “We’re running behind schedule, Kristy. Let’s get up there.”
The elevator took less than a minute to climb to the 50th floor, and before she could back out she found herself standing in a second, smaller lobby, her only means of escape descending back to ground level. She was on her own.
Kristy tried to get her bearings, but the floor was completely dark. She looked at her watch: 2:36AM. The team had insisted that the op take place at night, and now, suspended fifty stories high in complete darkness, she regretted ever agreeing to it. “Your night vision is on your left side, by your ear.” The technician again. He should be out here, Kristy thought. It’s his tech.
With her night vision on, it was clear where she was supposed to go: two big glass doors to her left, past the other elevators. The doors were relics of a past she hadn’t thought of often in the last few years, and she patted her thigh as she walked up, feeling for a keycard she knew wasn’t there. The scanner blinked red.
“It’s been disabled,” said the tech. Kristy wanted to ask why the lights were off if they still had so much control over this place, but she held back. She had a feeling she wouldn’t like the answer.
She grabbed the door handle and pulled. She was inside. Even with the suit, she could feel the stale air escaping into the lobby, and her spine tingled. She was the first person on this floor in three years.
Her instructions were clear: Make her rounds, check the offices, then come home. She hesitated beyond the door, then decided to walk the floor counterclockwise. She wasn’t ready to see her desk yet.
From afar, the first block of desks looked as though people had been there earlier that day. Some chairs faced each other, as though deep in conversation, coffee cups littered the desks, and Kristy saw piles of women’s shoes on the floor. High heels, she thought. She hadn’t worn high heels since her last time in this office.
Her intercom crackled. “Please get closer.” She snapped out of her trance and moved into one row of desks. Even with the night vision, she could see that a thick layer of dust coated everything, and the coffees were full of mold. Her eyes lingered on a picture of two young boys, sitting on their father’s lap. She thought of Tom. “Stay strong Kristy,” she whispered to herself.
“Yes, please stay strong Kristy.” It was the deep voice again. The leader. “We’re taking pictures of everything you see, so the faster you move through the floor the faster you get out of there.” She turned to scan the next row of desks.
As she turned, she felt something moving off to her side and screamed. She turned and caught a glimpse of a long, thick tail slipping between filing cabinets. Rats. She should have expected them. Bending over to catch her breath, the technician chimed in. “Absolutely nothing to worry about, Kristy. Rats are a natural outcome of urban abandon. Remember, they’re more scared of you than you are of them.”
Kristy started to say exactly what she thought of the technician, and then caught herself. She wasn’t used to having her every word broadcasted to her superiors. You don’t know shit about these rats, she thought. She continued moving through the floor.
The rest of the desks were the same: dust-covered photos, yellowed printouts and crusted old coffee cups. A few times, at the sight of a young boy or girl she might have remembered, Kristy paused. But it was her safety on the line, not theirs. There was no time to remember.
After finishing a section of the floor, she moved into the offices. What sad places to work, she thought, looking at the cramped little rooms piled high with papers. She had been jealous of those people, who were senior enough, or driven enough, to merit their own tiny space, but not anymore. Now all she wanted in the world was to return to her tiny desk, squeezed in between Vijay and Greg. Just a little contact with somebody else, anybody else.
Kristy continued working her way around the edge of the building, documenting every inch as she went. An “insurance fact-finding mission” is how the job had been sold to her, and the insurance guys wanted to see everything.
Before turning onto the eastern side of the tower, she checked her watch: 5:50am. She had been at it for over three hours, and still had a quarter of the floor left to go. The deep voice, silent for most of her recon work, spoke up. “Nothing to worry about Kristy. Plenty of time before sunrise.” She nodded. “Just remember,” the voice added. “Daylight makes extraction far more difficult.”
Rounding the corner onto her old side of the floor, Kristy stopped. The banner was still there, stretched above her desk in a droopy smile.
CONGRATULATIONS ON THE BABY GIRL, KRISTY!
She steadied herself against the wall and tried to swallow the lump in her throat. From somewhere off in the distance, she heard the intercom crackle with muted gasps. “Oh, man,” whispered the technician. “I didn’t know she…” Then Kristy lost consciousness.
When she woke, all the men were arguing.
“This was a mistake. We never should have sent a woman.”
“Especially not one who lost a baby! I mean come on, Mark! What were you thinking?”
“It’s been three years, dammit – and she volunteered! How would I know the girl would still be hung up on it?”
Kristy began to move, then decided against it.
“She lost her baby in the pandemic, Mark. That’s how you should have known. These missions always open old wounds.”
“Well, it’s time she moved on. We all have. That’s why we’re out here in the first place.”
Kristy sat up. “That’s why I’m out here in the first place, you mean.” She looked at her watch. She’d lost another ten minutes she didn’t have. “Let’s just get me out of here.”
She used a desk to pull herself up off the floor, and began scanning the area at twice her usual speed, making sure to look at every single surface. That idiot technician will just have to rewind.
When she got to her desk she paused for a second, just long enough to wipe the dust from Tom’s photo. A baby wasn’t all she’d lost.
By 6:45AM the sun had peaked through the clouds and the floor was filled with the eerie glow of morning. In the light, everything looked worse, more abandoned. The walls were yellowed and stained from burst pipes; the carpets chewed by rats. “Can I get out of here?” Kristy asked the team.
“All clear.”
In the elevator, Kristy thought about what the men said. Three years was enough time to heal. She needed to move on.
The intercom crackled. It was the deep voice again – Mark. “Kristy, we’re getting reports from the air that the sun’s too high for a quick touch down. The camps are all awake and there’s already fighting in the street out front.”
She closed her eyes and leaned against the wall of the elevator. She knew what was coming.
“We’re gonna have to come back and get you tonight.”