Anya was sitting at her desk in her cubicle, just a generic office desk situated in a nondescript cubicle in a sea of equally nondescript cubicles, when it happened. She felt the very floor rumble and watched as a couple of the particle board ceiling tiles fell to the ground, leaving powdery trails behind them and exposing the wiring and ventilation ducts. The coffee in her mug, cold by now anyway, sent out a cascade of ever expanding rings, as if someone had dropped a stone in it. Anya reflexively gripped the edge of her desk as her wheeled office chair began to drift towards the back corner of her cubicle with her still seated in it. Papers were drifting around the office, airborne despite the fact that there was no breeze, and Anya’s computer had turned off, as if someone had abruptly and unceremoniously pulled the plug. All of this happened in the span of two seconds.
“WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?!”, one of her co-workers shouted in stunned surprise. No one answered him because no one else knew any more than he did. A number of people ran over to the person-sized windows and peered out. They scanned the street first, then craned their necks to look both up and down the building before focusing their searching faces on something happening a little lower down the building and to the right. “Look!”, urged the new intern, pointlessly pointing a shaking finger. “There’s thick black smoke POURING out of the building! Looks like the ninetieth floor! I think the building is on fire!”
Anya had not released her grip from the edge of her desk yet. She slowly relaxed her fingers as she tried to do the same to her mind. Another person shrieked frantically, “But what made the building shake?! Fire doesn’t do that, not to a building this big!! It must have been a bomb!!!” Anya finally felt calm enough to attempt speech. “It doesn’t matter what it was; we need to evacuate right now.” No one moved. Anya cleared her throat and shouted, “RIGHT NOW!” The new intern finally pried his eyes away from the window and looked at her. “Shouldn’t we stay put, though? We don’t know the extent of the fire and we can’t use the elevators; 105 flights down is a long way to go…” Someone else piped up, “The firefighters are going to need to carry equipment up the stairs, what if we get in their way?” Someone else chimed in, “Yeah, we should stay here until we receive instructions…they’ll sound the all clear when the fire is out.”
Anya could not believe what she was hearing from people that she had, until that very moment, considered rational and intelligent. She was about to say something in retort when she stopped and scanned the faces of her colleagues. She saw mild alarm mixed with blind adherence to orthodoxy; she almost expected someone to go “Baaaa”, like a sheep would. Frustrated, she spun on her heels (thinking how fortunate it was that she was wearing flat soled shoes that day) and returned to her cubicle where she grabbed her jacket and purse. With these in hand she proceeded to make her way to the exit to the 105 flights of stairs that separated her from freedom.
When she opened the office doors, however, she was immediately overwhelmed by acrid black smoke. She put her jacket over her mouth and nose and tried to remember where the stairs were. Her eyes stung and her light jacket offered precious little protection. Despite all of this, she managed to grope her way down the corridor to the stairwell, its red EXIT sign a beacon in the smoky blackness. She pushed on the door and entered into one of Dante’s circles of Hell. The smoke, sucked upward by the void of the stairwell, was even worse than it had been in the corridor. Bits of flaming debris danced all around her and singed her hair, clothes, and skin. Still she pressed onward, downward. But she only made it down five flights before the stairs simply disappeared. Vanished. Gone.
Where the stairs used to be was now a burning and twisted maze of pulverized concrete, torn and glowing red hot steel supports, and the thick black smoke. Dejected and with her panic rising, she climbed back up to the corridor. Anya knew that there were other stairwells, so she carefully searched for them only to find each one impassible. She had no alternative but to go back to the office. This time, when she opened the doors, she was again met with the wall of acrid black smoke. So, it’s gotten in here, too, she thought. Most of her coworkers were huddled in a corner of the office under the main air vent, but a few were trying to break one of the massive windows, presumably in the hope of getting breathable air. Anya didn’t have the heart, or a clear enough respiratory system, to tell them that the windows were industrial grade reinforced glass and wouldn’t break even if a sledgehammer crashed into them. She went over to her huddled coworkers, her jacket now tied around the lower half of her face, and sat down.
“Wha…what happened? Why are you *cough* back?” someone asked her. Anya coughed a couple of times, trying to clear her vocal chords. She then sputtered, “Stairs….all gone. Smoke everywhere. Melting steel.” The final sentence, unsaid, hung over them like the smoke: No way out and no way in. There wasn’t going to be a rescue squad. None of them was going to leave the offices of Morgan and Morgan, Financial Consultants ever again. Anya looked at her sensible flat soled shoes and wryly thought, Should have worn heels. At least when they find my body they would have admired my sense of style. But the irony was lost, gone a moment later as a fit of coughing wracked Anya’s delicate frame. She could see that a couple of her coworkers were lying down, as if awaiting death. Wait. No. They were dead, their limbs limp and eyes glazed and rolled unnaturally high in their sockets.
That’s when pure, undiluted panic rose in Anya to such a degree that she felt herself dissociating. She was leaving her body, floating high above it, unbothered by the scene below. Oddly enough, a profound sense of release washed over her, much as the ocean tide washes over the beach. Anya was fortunate in this regard, for the next second the floor gave way and everyone plummeted along with the entire building: falling, burning and shrieking 105 floors to the ground below. Anya was right: no one left the office that day.
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