In a sea of concrete there's doldrums.
My compass has lost its hand.
The engine is humming, the wheels are making the print of the road on the seat. The bus is full to bursting, a little more and people will have to climb on top of each other.
- " How do i get off?" - Carmen thought. She stood right between the two exits. The information board looked like it had suffered a stroke, and the voice-alert speaker only gave a low squeak, so the only way to keep track of her path was through the window.
- "That's the TC, so now I'm on Trade Cluster Uprising..." she pondered, "Mnem, the next stop is mine, it appears."
There was nothing else to do, she began to squeeze through, stepping on others feet and apologizing every second, but quietly and to herself. There wasn't much left to the door.
Sleep pressed and pressed, ready to fall with all its weight on her head, crushing her skull and finally giving Carmen her well-deserved sleep, if it weren't for the strange pungent odor on the bus. Closest to the doors the thickest, the crowd stood as one, there was no getting through.
Just then the very same squeak was heard from the speaker, and the doors hissed. The crowd became visibly animated and in an instant rushed as soon as the bus doors opened, and Carmen was carried out with them like by a violent current.
Once outside, she took a deep breath, turned in a familiar direction, and headed wherever she knew how. The streets were brightening, the daylight cycle lamps were warming up and preparing to lend their light and warmth to the streets of the accursed city. Some kind of alert was warning of something a few levels above. She couldn't see what was being feared from down here, but Carmen hastened to assume that somewhere up there, the night's yield had fallen upon someone.
Crowds of people swirling and flying by in whirlwinds, like autumn leaves, which Carmen had never seen, but that's how they were described by the people from InSat with whom they had recently cooperated in transportation.
New Army Street, make a right turn.
What should she say? She walked past the watchmaker's store, the window displaying all sorts of old-style imitation wood clocks with hands. Each one was wound up and said in unison that the time was 8:27, which to her meant being late and a pay cut for the next contract.
-Max is going to eat my brains out... The complaints will pour out like from a bucket... -She thought about it turn after turn, she was thinking about how she would justify herself, until she changed her mind to look for excuses. If it was necessary to think about them so much, then there were none! That's right, say anything, he could easily argue that she should have left the house earlier and he'd probably be right, damn him!
Suddenly it became dark. Sunken in her thoughts, she had already made her last turn on the way to the Mountain and found herself in a alleyway. Step by step, something crunched under her feet.
After a dozen meters one could see a red stripe. It was completely flat, but it glowed better and longer than anything that had ever been installed here. Above the stripe was the inscription "Mountain," and below it was a heavy metal door with the company's logo printed on, and she stood right in front of it.
It was very quiet behind the door, oddly quiet, as one usually hears muffled chatter or door bells, but now it was as if nothing existed behind it at all. With no particular concern, Carmen put her hand on the knob and pulled the door open.
She took a breath, but didn't let it out. There was nothing behind the door, or rather, nothing to be seen, only a couple of meters after the door shyly illuminated by the light spilling in from outside.
Carmen stood holding the door with her hand. She wondered if she'd checked the mailbox today. Had there been something about a scheduled blackout? She tried to think of a logical reason for what was going on that wasn't out of the ordinary, but nothing made sense. The boundaries of ordinary had to be widened, and with them came variants of what was happening that stirred her brain and made her heart beat harder in fear of the unknown and the possible.
She finally exhaled and took a few steps forward. The darkness surrounded her now on both her left and right. She lifted her foot and stood on the first step. After three more steps she heard the crunch of something glassy under her boot. Her feet were no longer visible, nor could she see what was beneath them. She could only guess that she had stepped on shards of a lamp that certainly must have been on the wall to her right.
Carmen kept walking despite the anxiety screaming in her head. A step. Turn. Step. Splash, she stepped in a puddle of something spilled on the ground of the third floor.
For what reason does she climb up, ignoring obvious danger and a possible encounter with the night's yield, or worse, following into the jaws of unease and mounting terror? At this hour, everyone in the building should already be starting work, getting their gear ready, listening to the briefing and waiting for the pay to be announced. Her team should be doing the same thing at this point. Someone's out there right now waiting to be found.
Step. Step. Step. Step. Turn. Step. Step. Step.
By her blindness she had to count the floors and now she was approaching, if her clouded mind's ability to count was to be believed, floor 18, her stop.
Grasping the door in the darkness, she searches for the handle. The steel on it burned, but it was still there, which made Carmen sigh a little in relief. Gathering all her remaining courage in the palm of her hand, she yanked the knob and pulled, unprepared to see the worst behind the door. The creak of the door in the utter silence sounded like a heart-wrenching scream.
The red light of the emergency lamps turned the foyer into a red-and-black mess, sucking all other color out of the room. Carmen staggered a little, but stepped into the room. The second thing that caught her eye was the mess. Scattered papers, belongings, a broken monitor, and shards of glass from the reception safety windows. All of this left no doubt that something terrible had taken place here and that someone, whoever it was, was fighting for their life in this very room. However, apart from all that, the room was empty, no living or dead. To the left of the reception desk was the staff door, untouched.
Carmen rushed to the door and pulled on the knob, just to be on time. The door wouldn't budge, meaning the lock still worked, so there was still hope. Alive or not, someone was waiting for them to be found and rescued.
She cautiously reached for the bag, as if afraid some sort of beast would leap out at her from a cavity in it.
In those moments, just for a second, there was one twisted thought, one wish flowing through her mind. She suddenly wished that she'd forgotten her ID badge at home so she wouldn't have to open that door, so that anyone left there wouldn't be her fault.
Fumbling for a plastic card in her side pocket, she pulled it sharply, as if she were pulling the trigger cord of a chainsaw. To her unwarranted horror, the card caught on something, and she pulled and pulled, over and over, as if her heart would stop in just a few seconds if she didn't open that door. Finally, along with the access card, her wallet and some kind of pen flew out of her bag, and the poor plastic hit the scanner glass.
A second passed, the diode turned green, and the door beeped. Carmen gripped the knob until her fingers turned white and froze. The air felt like it was sucked out of her chest again and froze in her windpipe, weightlessness covering her body with a membrane. She was afraid in a way she'd never been afraid before.
The door rattled against the wall of the room, for Carmen was no longer holding it. Her hands dropped the moment her eyes became accustomed to the light coming from inside. Every little shred of hope died and rotted away.
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