Breathe Read online

‘We’re going to get Clarke’s keys,’ says Ben, ‘and take a look inside Room 3014.’

  7. FRIDAY 11:47 AM

  It’s a drastic move, but she can’t think what else to do: Meera chucks a cup of coffee into a wiring panel and shorts the computer outside Clarke’s office. Then she calls Fitch’s attention to the computer. Fitch is drunker than a fly in a martini. She hammers on Clarke’s door, and he emerges, looking as if he’s just been woken up. The moment he leaves his office to inspect the damage, Ben slips inside, searching his jacket for keys. He’s out with them just before Clarke storms back, slamming the door behind him.

  Across the room, Miranda is going through Felix’s desk. She locates the key finder, a black plastic hand-set, and turns it on, so that its LED starts slowly chirping.

  She sets off to find out where the sound is coming from, running the finder around the room. The electronic signal quickens – especially when she moves near a large aluminium ventilator grating.

  She sees another CCTV camera secreted on the floor in the corner of the room. You’d think the damn things were breeding. She twists the entire unit off its base and throws it in a bin. The finder is going mad. Miranda pulls out a screwdriver and starts undoing the screws that hold the vent cover.

  Far above her, on the forbidden directors’ floor, Ben and Meera step out into the corridor. They head for Room 3014. The door has warning signs on it:

  HAZCHEM, STERILE ZONE.

  Fumbling with the keys, Meera checks her back, then opens the great steel door.

  They slip inside and find, in the centre of the room, an immense, grey plastic box. There are a number of unmarked yellow cylinders, like diving tanks, connected to it.

  Ben is disappointed. ‘That’s the sensor unit for an air-con system.’

  Meera shakes her head. ‘This isn’t any old air-con system, baby, it’s a SymaxCorp system. This is what we make. I’ve never seen one of these things up close.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘What’s the difference between a Ford and a Ferrari? This is the future. Check it out. The chemical composition of the building’s atmosphere can be changed via different program settings. When people get tense, they breathe quicker, and you get excess acidity in the air. The gauges measure dioxins and alkaline levels and gently compensate, restoring a natural oxygen balance that relieves stress. Except …’ She checks a line of coloured bars, incomprehensible to Ben.

  ‘Except what?’

  ‘These readings are way off. The SymaxCorp system doesn’t just recycle air from outside, it adds pure oxygen. But this isn’t pure. It’s some kind of weird chemical mix. I know enough about pharmacology to see that half of this shit isn’t even approved for public consumption.’ She runs her hand along some greyish residue at the outlet to one of the pumps, and licks her index finger. ‘Interesting.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I think we’ve got one superheated cocaine speedball going through the building. Mix it with a cocktail of manufactured chemical compounds, and there’s no telling what the effects could be. How long can you hold your breath?’

  ‘Everyone has to breathe.’ They consider the point for a moment. ‘You think the directors figured they could get everyone to work harder if they pumped in this stuff?’

  ‘Long-term, it would brain-damage your workforce. That would be counter-productive. Wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Then they must have introduced the crack element in order to get the presentation prepared in time.’

  ‘So how is all the other stuff getting mixed in there?’

  ‘Maybe the system is fucked.’

  They look at the gleaming pipes and cylinders, and listen to the insidious hiss of air.

  Miranda takes the vent casing off and climbs inside the duct. She enters an unnerving maze of tubes, tunnels and conduits. The dark passages get narrower as she follows the quickening chirrup of the finder, pushing her way into ever more claustrophobic spaces. Following the signal, she turns into another pipe with a smaller gauge –

  – and discovers that she is stuck. No matter how hard she wriggles, she can’t free herself from the constricting walls of the pipe. The key-finder is beeping faster still.

  Ben and Meera, meanwhile, have torn up a floor grating in Room 3014 and are now, coincidentally, peering down into another of the interconnected vents. Meera is trying to make sense of what she’s seeing. Why would the system radically change the air?

  Miranda is starting to panic. She is completely trapped. There’s no way forward and no way back. The key-finder is going wild, almost a continuous beep. She twists in the hot darkness, and finds a loose steel plate above her. She manages to raise her foot and kick at the plate. It’s not bolted, and flies away.

  Felix’s rotting corpse falls on top of her.

  Miranda screams, fighting off the maggot-infested cadaver as it leaks over her neck and arms, its putrefying face falling against hers, its stomach bursting open in a liquefied mess, releasing its gases. Fumes roll off the body, travelling up through the ventilation shafts, all the way to the sensors in Room 3014 …

  … which go wild as they try to rebalance the air composition.

  The sensors react to the rotting cadaver, sending chemical gauges into red-zone overload.

  An electronic alarm starts whining somewhere. Lights flash. It’s never a good sign when systems in public places do this.

  Bathed in pulsing crimson light, Ben and Meera see the startling effect on the sensors. They are connected to tanks of air additives, the mechanical valves of which start rotating. Now they are unstoppably turning by themselves, until they are wide open.

  ‘Whoa!’ Meera jumps back. ‘Something big just hit the sensors.’

  ‘Was it something we did?’

  ‘I think we should get out of here.’ The pair of them duck out of the room, shutting the door behind them.

  Above Swan’s desk, next to his framed Bible quotes, a sensor light starts pulsing red. Newly toxic air is pumping out of the vent above him. He’s sweating, and Bible-thumping mad.

  Above Clarke’s head, too, a sensor light starts pulsing as poisoned air pours through the vent in an unpleasantly warm stream.

  Above Fitch’s head, an identical sensor light pulses as the deadly air pumps in more heavily than ever before.

  Air vents above all of the remaining working staff start to deliver corrupt air as the remaining green LEDs switch over to red.

  In the security guards’ station, the same thing is happening. Poisoned air pumps in, and red lights flash. One guard pulls his Taser from his holster, and cracks it into life with a wicked grin.

  All over the building, the air is being replaced.

  8. FRIDAY 12:07 PM

  Miranda desperately hammers on the wall of the pipe. The matching key on Felix’s collapsed, putrid body is flashing with the finder. She can’t move back because the corpse is blocking her exit. There’s no way of moving forward. The air is clouding up, getting hard to breathe.

  Through every floor, staff members are feeling the effects of the contaminated air. Collars are torn open, work is stamped on and thrown into bins – it’s an effect they have been feeling for weeks, but infinitely multiplied.

  Clarke comes out of his office, looking crazed. He sees Ben’s, Meera’s and Miranda’s empty workstations. ‘Where are they?’ he asks, in his softest, most menacing tone. ‘What the bloody hell is going on around here?’ He ignores the fact that half his staff seem to be missing. That’s the trouble with obsessives; they home in on one thing and won’t leave it alone. ‘Young people think they’re so clever,’ he rants. ‘We’ll see about that. Why is there no discipline in this office?’

  Swan picks up his Bible and moves towards June’s desk. ‘Miss Ayson, you always know where they are.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Swan, I don’t,’ June is happy to tell him. ‘And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.’

  ‘Then we’ll find them together,’ grits Swan. ‘It’s time we made an
example of these slackers for Mr Clarke.’

  He drags the surprised June toward the fire escape stairs.

  Meera and Ben call the lift – none of the lifts have a thirtieth floor marked, but apparently they do come up here. They look up at one of the giant hissing ventilator grilles, working right above their heads. Ben studies it suspiciously. ‘We shouldn’t be breathing this. Let me know if you start to go nuts.’

  The elevator doors open before them just as a group of directors turns into the corridor.

  In the reception area, the pounding video screens are showing the kind of relentless, upbeat visuals that would drive anyone mad. Unable to take it any longer, Ms Thompson attempts to switch them off.

  When she is unable to do this, she tries to tear the plugs from the wall, but they won’t come out. In desperation, she drags the monitors down from their mounts by clambering onto them, sending them to the floor, where they explode in crackling rainbows of pixel light.

  Miranda can’t catch her breath. There is no more air left in the shaft. She hammers weakly on the walls. She feels her stomach lighten, and suddenly throws up.

  Motorcycle couriers don’t think about too much when they deliver packages. This one is whistling cheerfully to himself as he dismounts and strides inside the SymaxCorp building. Glad to get out of the rain, he crosses the lobby and is directed to the twentieth floor receptionist.

  As soon as the lift doors open, he knows there’s a problem. The air is thick, smouldering with soot and pieces of burning paper. Ms Thompson is seated at her granite desk, surrounded by small but fierce fires.

  ‘I got a package for the marketing department,’ he tells her. Ms Thompson carefully sets the package down in front of her. Something explodes on the wall behind them. He tries to ignore the problem. ‘I need a signature. If you would initial …’

  He gives the receptionist his signature pad and a pen. She snaps the pen in half and throws it over her shoulder, then stares at him as if she is going to kill him.

  ‘Sign underneath …’ he suggests.

  She squirts lighter fuel over the pad and sets fire to it.

  ‘… And, er, print your name. Or perhaps I’ll just go. It’s not a good time, is it? I’ll just go, eh.’

  The courier turns and walks away fast, trying to get the hell out, but the receptionist beats him to it. As Ms Thompson stares at this man in leathers who dares to pester her with demands, her eyes cloud liverishly. She brings him down with the kind of extraordinary flying tackle that Clarke wishes his son might one day make, and for good measure twists the poor boy’s head back to front inside his crash helmet.

  ‘All helmets must be removed!’ she screams shrilly, before returning to her desk and collapsing onto it with a skull-fracturing thud.

  Meera and Ben are descending through the building. The electricity powers down and the lights flicker as the elevator comes to a slow, grinding halt between floors.

  ‘Now what?’ asks Ben.

  There is a metallic bang, and the elevator is plunged into darkness.

  Swan has always had the capacity to become evangelical, but this is going too far. He has grabbed June’s hands and is pulling her before him, pawing her in a distinctly un-Christian manner.

  ‘Mr Swan,’ yells June, ‘you’re hurting me!’

  ‘Accept Jesus as your saviour,’ commands Swan. ‘We’ll pray to the Lord together.’

  June is horrified. ‘But I’m an agnostic!’

  ‘Then we must pray for your soul! Oh June, ever since I first saw you, I longed for the touch of your silken skin.’ Swan falls on his knees in front of her, burying his head between her thighs.

  Much to June’s own surprise, she kicks him as hard as she can in the groin, feeling his pods retreat into his pelvic cavity. Revolted, she hurries away from Swan, but he staggers to his feet and comes after her, seizing her arm. Most men would be rolling around on the floor for a while.

  June breaks free and runs for the stairs, but Swan throws himself after her with abandon, and the pair crash to the edge of the landing. June is knocked cold. Swan has shattered a kneecap on the concrete steps, but this doesn’t stop him from dragging her away. His eyes are clouded over with thick, white cataracts.

  ‘Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord.’ He feels the power of the Holy Spirit building within him, hears the swish of blood in his ears as germs invade his soft, pink brain.

  Fitch looks up from her screen to realise that she is the only one still working on her part of the floor, although on the far side of the room a woman sits typing in the nude. Two financial controllers are attempting to rape a girl from Accounts. A junior technician is pissing onto his computer keyboard and screaming abuse at it. The mail boy is masturbating into an Amazon box. If Dante’s Inferno had fire officers and a pension plan, it would have been like this.

  Fitch tries to make sense of what she sees. Finally she gives up and starts pulling bottles of liquor out of her drawer. She lines up five bottles of Scorpion Vodka and proceeds to down them, one after the other. The alcohol scorches her throat and numbs her head; it’s a good feeling.

  Ben reaches up and pushes back the elevator hatch, then clambers up onto the roof in the lift shaft. It’s dark, but he can see the maintenance ladder clearly. He starts climbing up to the floor above. Reaching the doors, he tries to force them open, but they won’t budge. Just then, he hears a banging noise coming from the side of the shaft. He listens, then calls out: ‘Miranda! Where are you?’

  A faint voice. ‘In here!’

  Ben tracks the noise to a large, aluminium grille. He searches the grille for a way to release it. ‘I can’t get you out. Wait a minute.’

  Just then, the power comes back on and the lift starts moving up toward him. Ben sees a loop of electrical cable hanging down near the grille and grabs one end, threading it through the grille. He finishes knotting it with seconds to spare as the lift carries him up.

  Ben is still holding the end of the cable, which runs quickly through his hands. He scrambles back down though the roof hatch of the lift to Meera, and ties the cable around himself. ‘Meera!’ he shouts, ‘take it down! Take the lift down!’

  Ben hangs tight to the cable end, hoping the lift will pull the grille off. The lift stops, then starts to descend. They pass the grille. The cable pulls tight. But it doesn’t pull the grille free, because Ben’s weight isn’t enough. What it does is haul Ben up out of the lift through its roof hatch.

  Meera has sent the lift all the way down. Now she is madly punching the buttons, trying to stop it.

  Ben is suspended from the cable in the lift shaft as the elevator retreats away from him. Only the grille is holding him, but it’s cheaply made, and starts to pull free. Inside, Miranda tries to kick it free with her foot. ‘That’s it,’ she shouts, ‘it’s coming!’

  ‘No! Miranda, no!’ yells Ben.

  She smashes at the grille, helping to loosen it. She can’t see the consequences. The grille’s rivets pop out and the whole thing bends outwards. Ben desperately tries to swing back and forth in the shaft, his feet searching for some kind of foothold. The lift is a long way below him now, heading for the bottom of the shaft.

  The grille is almost off. Miranda gives it a last hard kick with both feet, and it breaks free. Still attached to the grille by the cable, Ben drops like a stone.

  Suddenly Miranda sees what’s happened and tries to grab the falling grille – but she’s too late.

  Meera is trapped in the lift as it starts its ascent. Something heavy slams onto the roof, as Ben falls back through the hatch onto the floor. The cable and the grille follow him in and nearly decapitate Meera.

  Miranda is now halfway out of the ventilator shaft when she sees the lift coming back up, and is forced to duck back inside. But she has lost her grip, and finds herself hanging on to Felix’s putrescent corpse, which is slipping out with her. Moments later they are both half-hanging out of the shaft, about to be sliced in two by the lift. As Miranda scrambles over i
t, Felix’s corpse slides free beneath her. The ascending lift rends Felix in half – easily slicing through the bad meat – and leaves Miranda flat on the roof.

  Miranda falls into the lift in a liquid shower of guts. She lands on Meera. Ben’s knees are bleeding, Meera is badly bruised and Miranda smells awful, but at least they’re all alive.

  By now, the open-plan office has become a macabre parody of its depiction in the company brochure. Two female marketing managers have been stripped and tied together, and their hair set on fire. Undercurrents of sex and violence have risen to the surface like marsh gas as workers obey their darkest instincts. Staff are wiping files, shredding papers, mutilating themselves, arguing, attempting sex, pulling off ties and brassieres, tearing at their buttons, fighting and mauling each other.

  Clarke slips out of his office. He calls the lift, but then, rather than wait, decides to take the stairs. He doesn’t see that the lift doors have opened behind him, revealing the remains of Draycott’s corpse and three people coated in decaying offal. He passes Swan, who is dragging the screaming June down the stairs behind him.

  Ben and Meera help Miranda out of the lift. They slip and slide, heading for the ladies’ toilets. Miranda will be the hardest to wash clean. ‘He must have been there for weeks, just rotting to bits,’ gasps Miranda.

  Meera knows what happened now. ‘The system is replacing the germs with stronger chemicals,’ she says. ‘It hasn’t gone wrong. If anything, it’s just being efficient. We’ve got to shut it down.’

  ‘It’d be quicker to get everyone out of the building,’ Ben tells them.

  ‘Yeah? How are you going to do that?’

  ‘There must be a fire alarm box somewhere.’

  ‘The heat-sensors should have responded by now and turned the sprinklers on.’

  ‘Then we have to tell the staff what’s happening, and pull them out ourselves.’

  They push open the doors to the open-plan office and find themselves in a Brueghelian nightmare of orgiastic chaos. The staff have put Meadows’ stereo unit on; it’s playing very loud trance music. The air is dense and dirty.

  Miranda stands there with her hands on her hips. ‘Do you want to tell them, or shall I?’