Breathe

6. FRIDAY 9:25 AM

The stormy weather has been building all week. Now the heat cracks, and thunder riffs around the office towers, hitting the business district in full fury. Cauls of rain wash across the bare quadrangles. Sheets of water slam and break around planes of windswept concrete. The workers scurry into the sheltering cathedral of the SymaxCorp building under black umbrellas. Religious places are always places of refuge as well as of torment.

Ben shakes out his umbrella, besmirching the perfect marble of the lobby floor with dark spots. He catches Meera near the elevator and steers her away from the gaze of the cameras. He wants to thank her for the helping hand yesterday. Miranda tick-tocks her way across the lobby toward them. She’s already been in for a couple of hours.

‘Today’s the big one,’ Meera warns. ‘They’ve been working all night again. I feel fucking awful and I haven’t even been here.’ It feels weird to hear a girl in a sari swear. They both recognise that there’s a crisis coming, but what can they do? They’re merely paid employees. Even nicknaming the Chairman after a vampire is tantamount to civil disobedience, and it’s as far as most of their colleagues will dare go. But multinational conglomerates are not taken down by the judicious wielding of sarcasm. There aren’t even many directors, thinks Ben, who can make policy changes. When a company gets this big, it becomes a machine with a mind of its own.

The lift arrives. There’s a girl inside who can’t decide whether to come out or stay in. She drops a pile of papers, looking half-dead. ‘Some people upstairs are getting very fucking weird,’ she says, as Ben, Meera and Miranda pile in. ‘Three o’clock this morning, there was a fist-fight between two teams over coffee-breaks.’

‘Why do they stay?’ asks Ben.

‘Hive mentality,’ Meera tells him. ‘We’re worker bees, conditioned from birth. That, and the incredible overtime.’

‘Why do we live this shitty life when we could be lying in the sun?’ asks the girl, not looking as if she expects an answer. ‘I haven’t had a tan since student riots closed our school.’

‘Clarke came in at five o’clock this morning,’ Miranda yawns. ‘He’s having a shit-fit about his computer. His entire hard drive has gone.’ She flashes a furtive smile at Ben. ‘I’m out of here the second I get paid.’

The morning starts bad and gets worse. Clarke is ensconced in his office with the door shut. Every once in a while, a muffled shout of anger comes through the wall. The work-floor is a mess. There are papers, files and half-eaten boxes of junk food everywhere. Someone has thrown their trousers into the fountain.

At eleven, Miranda grabs Ben and drags him off. ‘You have got to come and see this.’ She leads him down a floor, to the Accounts Department, and pushes open a door.

‘Apparently, they’ve been here all night. No wonder Meadows took a dive.’

The accountants are gathered around a computer that they have covered in dozens of red candles and votive offerings. They appear to be worshipping it, chanting numbers at the garlanded screen. Their hummed refrain is the theme tune to The Simpsons.

‘It’s true,’ says Ben. ‘There is a thin line between accountancy and madness.’

At eleven thirty, Meera makes an announcement. ‘I think I’ve been looking for the wrong thing,’ she tells them, tapping her screen with a pen.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Electro-magnetic radiation wouldn’t do this. You heard Howard. I’ve been on every website he could recommend and haven’t found a thing. It couldn’t spark a kind of collective mental breakdown.’

‘So what do we look for?’

‘I don’t know – some kind of trauma event.’

‘When did you first notice changes in people?’

Miranda thinks. ‘Maybe three weeks ago.’

‘Soon after Felix went missing. You’re sure he never went home? Suppose he’s still here.’ Ben feels tired and sore-headed. He didn’t sleep well.

‘There is one way to find out,’ suggests Meera.

‘How?’

‘His car key has a finder. It emits an electronic pulse coded to its matching base. All staff with car park spaces have them. It’s so the guards can locate the keys to move vehicles.’

Miranda slaps her forehead. ‘I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that! I’m sorry, I don’t drive, all right?’

‘How will we find the key finder?’ asks Ben.

‘It’ll be with the rest of Felix’s things,’ says Miranda. ‘I can take care of the search. What are you two going to do?’

‘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 it, 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?’

9. FRIDAY 1:49 PM

Faced with a full-scale staff riot, Meera and Ben are trying to think what to do. ‘What about blocking the air ducts?’ suggests Meera.

‘There are hundreds all over the building.’

‘Then we’ll do it another way. Call the police.’ Meera grabs the nearest phone and punches out a number. Ear-splitting feedback causes her to drop the receiver.

She tries her mobiles – all IT staff seem to have at least three – but the signal is scrambled. ‘Now that is electro-magnetic interference. There’s no way of getting through to the outside.’

‘Try the computers.’

The same goes for the internet and e-mail systems. As Miranda logs on, the computer screens start rolling with static and weird images. An old episode of Bewitched seems to be playing on many of the terminals.

Ben sees that the directors’ offices are empty. He calls out to one of his colleagues, Jake, who is busy feeding his hard-copy documents into a waste-bin fire.

‘Where are the directors?’ he asks.

‘They’re up with Dr Samphire, preparing for the satellite presentation on the top floor.’

‘I can go downstairs and see if the lobby doors are still open,’ Miranda offers. Doing something will make her feel better.

Sally, one of the office assistants, is lying across her desk, being licked and fondled by two work mates. ‘Don’t do it, Miranda,’ she pleads. ‘Some of us don’t need the outside world anymore.’ Her eyes are rolled over into the whites – no pupils at all. ‘I’m sick of being told what to do every working day of my fucking life. Ask yourself what’s better; invoicing or a really good orgasm?’ One of her lickees takes Meera’s mobiles away from her and smashes them. Sally laughs hysterically.

‘It almost seems a shame to spoil the fun,’ says Ben.

‘Nevertheless, I think we’d better spoil it before someone else gets killed, don’t you?’ Meera snaps back. ‘There are over a thousand people in this building, and right now, most of them are going insane.’

‘We’re not.’

‘You’ve been here less than a week. Miranda temps, and I had a holiday. None of us has worked through the whole night. It’s the ones who have had prolonged exposure that worry me.’

Miranda is prepared to set off alone. ‘I can look after myself,’ she tells them. ‘I know my way around this place. I’ll meet you back here. If I can get away, I’ll call the police.’ She kisses Ben. ‘When we get out of this place, I’m going to show you how to relieve stress. Horizontally.’

10. FRIDAY 2:07 PM

Ben and Meera make their way up, but progress is slow, as burning pieces of furniture are being thrown down the centre of the stairwell. The air is acrid with smoke. The security guard who whacked him earlier rises from the steps in front of Ben. His eyes are white, too.

‘Fucking hell, not you again,’ Ben complains. The guard takes out his Taser and fires it up.

‘This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me,’ he promises. A blue arc cracks between the weapon’s points. Behind him, Meera detaches a fire extinguisher from the wall and brings it down hard on the guard’s head.

‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’ Meera would like to take the extinguisher with her, but it’s too heavy. She’s hitched up her sari to an undignified, but rather fetching, height.

Ben pockets the guard’s Taser. Incredibly, the guard gets to his feet behind their backs and comes after them again. Ben swings around the stair-pole and kicks him hard in the face. The guard goes down –

– and gets back up.

Ben wonders what they’re feeding him. The guard grabs Meera around the neck and starts choking her. Ben remembers the Taser and powers it into the guard’s groin. The guard screams and collapses –

– and gets back up.

‘He’s got balls.’ Meera and Ben nod to each other, then drop to the guard’s legs and tip him over the stairwell. This time he hits his head on every landing, spinning madly. He won’t be coming back again. They continue upwards.

‘I’ll do the directors,’ Ben suggests, ‘you do Room 3014.’

‘Got it.’ They split up when they hit the top floor.

11. FRIDAY 2:16 PM

Meera runs to Room 3014 and uses Clarke’s key to open the door. Inside, she goes to the air-con system’s master control box and tries to open it. She gets the razor-sharp doors apart, but is dumbfounded by the maze of electronics before her. She doesn’t see Clarke coming up behind her, raising his cricket bat. The bat has steel edges that look as if they’ve been sharpened for some purpose other than hitting sixes.

‘You disappoint me, Miss Mangeshkar,’ says the supervisor. ‘A bright girl like you stepping out of line, tampering with company property, jeopardising your career advancement.’

Ignoring him, Meera turns on the Taser. She applies it to the machinery, causing a small explosion that shorts out the system. But, as she watches, the system’s electronics neatly reroute themselves.

‘That’ll be the tamper-proof protection system. I’ve been watching you for a while, Miss Mangeshkar. Your spelling is atrocious.’ Clarke slowly lowers the cricket bat. Instead, he snatches the Taser from Meera and hits her in the stomach with it. Meera convulses in shock.

‘As a consequence of your inattention to detail, your employment here is officially terminated.’ Clarke hits her with the Taser again. Another violent shock.

‘Kindly empty your desk and see the human resources officer.’ He hits her with the Taser a third time.

‘A suitable reference will be forwarded to you.’

Meera’s body is wracked by electrical activity, and she collapses, almost losing consciousness. Clarke lifts his raised boot and swings a vicious kick at her. ‘We hope your time with us has been enjoyable and instructive,’ he concludes.

Meera rallies for a last-ditch attempt at stopping the man who employed her. She rises painfully to her feet with arms raised, ready to put her kickboxing lessons into practice, but she’s small and slender, while Clarke is heavy-set and demented. The supervisor’s eyes slowly cloud over, the pupils simply fading away. Meera sees the change and flinches, preparing for the worst …

… as Clarke again raises his cricket bat.

12. FRIDAY 2:25 PM

Miranda has had a tough time getting downstairs. The lobby is in chaos as she reaches it. The main doors to the building are locked. She tries them all – same story. She runs to the dazed reception guard. ‘Is there a way of opening these manually?’ she asks.

The guard is catatonic, motionless. ‘I went to university,’ he tells her.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I have a master’s degree in art history. Just so that I could wind up as a fucking security guard. A fucking trained Alsation could do this job. A blind one. With three legs.’

‘The key. I need the door key.’

‘My mother didn’t raise me to stand watch over some rich fucker’s property.’

‘The key!’ she shouts, slapping his face hard and preparing to duck in case he hits her back. But it seems to do the trick.

‘There’s a single master that overrides all the deadbolts to the outer doors and the atrium.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Out there.’ The guard points through the glass to the foliage-covered annexe.

The white-eyed Swan is just finishing locking the door to the atrium from the inside. He pockets the special deadbolt key and continues to pull June behind him. Although she is now conscious again, he has tied her hands together. He drags her across the forest floor of the atrium. ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, you painted Jezebel,’ he pants. ‘My God, you could afford to lose some weight.’

Meera is small, but she’s fast. As Clarke swings his bat, she drops to her knees and grabs his raised boot, tipping him off-balance. Clarke is back on his feet in moments. Obsessive men have hidden reserves of power. Roaring like a bear, he slams Meera backward into one of the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, with tremendous force. The glass holds, but its surround doesn’t. The whole thing starts to crack around the edges. Clarke charges forward, pinning Meera against the glass with his orthopedic boot as the rest of the frame cracks.

Clarke shakes his head piteously. ‘If only you could have learned to wear a dress like the other girls.’ He pushes down hard.

The entire panel divorces itself from the frame and falls out, taking Meera with it.

She falls slowly at first, almost gracefully. Meera plummets through space, sailing down on the glass sheet.

As Swan manhandles June on her stomach across the atrium, June hears a strange noise – shattering glass – and looks up. Swan looks up, too. The sheet of glass carrying Meera explodes through the roof of the atrium. Non-lethal fragments rain down, but the great window pane lands on Swan, shearing him in half at the softest point of his waist, and spraying June in blood.

Meera falls through the roof into the top of a tall, artificial palm tree.

From inside the building, Miranda hammers on the doors. June looks up at her in a daze. ‘June!’ she shouts, ‘June! You have to get the key!’ But June is too stunned to register anything. ‘The key! In his pocket! The key!’

As June gathers her senses, she realises what Miranda is asking of her. She reaches into the still-twitching corpse’s jacket and fishes for the key. As she does so, the top half of Swan convulses violently, making her scream. The half-a-corpse latches onto her, pulling her over and trying to drag itself on top. The ragged stump of Swan’s spinal cord is poking out from the bottom of his rib cage, so June stamps on it. As Swan falls back with a gurgling yell, she grabs the key and makes for the entrance door.

She has trouble finding the lock, but spots it and inserts the key. While she’s trying to twist it, Half-Swan starts clawing at her. Oddly, his lower half appears to have died. It’s only the part with the brain in that she has to worry about now. His right hand is trying to lock itself around her ankle. This is definitely sexual harassment, as defined in the office bible.

13. FRIDAY 2:37 PM

Ben reaches the directors’ boardroom and bursts in.

The directors number a dozen men, no women – there’s a surprise. They are seated beside Dr Hugo Samphire, drinking coffee at the long, walnut-veneer table, which is surrounded by colour-coded plans on raised boards. Some are furtively eating digestive biscuits. The front-man is talking to his New York audience at the start of the satellite video presentation. They’re completely oblivious to what’s been going on below.

‘Who are you?’ Dr Samphire snaps at Ben. ‘The satellite presentation is about to start. What the hell do you mean by barging your way in here?’

Ben is momentarily dumbfounded. He looks at the wall vents, which should be pumping the same poisoned air into the room as in the rest of the building. ‘You give your staff different air,’ he says, amazed that Miranda has been right all along.

The directors are glancing at each other; how can an employee know about this? The audience on the video monitor is starting to look puzzled.

‘Kill the link,’ someone orders. ‘We’ll call them back.’ One of the directors breaks the satellite connection. ‘You have to leave right now. Somebody call security.’

Ben is starting to understand the true nature of management. ‘You don’t even know what’s going on down there, do you?’ he realises. One of the directors is trying to call security, but having no luck. ‘The line’s dead,’ he tells the others.

Dr Samphire’s sense of order has been affronted. ‘There’s nothing in the air that’s not perfectly safe to breathe,’ he bridles.

‘There’s a dead body in the main ventilation shaft.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Think so? Try breathing this.’ Ben goes to the door and slams it wide open. On the other side of the corridor, he wedges open the stairwell door. The poisonous air pours in, rolling across the floor like plague-pit fumes.

‘The compounds we’re using will all be fully approved.’

‘You added drugs.’

‘Only to enhance efficiency for the purpose of preparing today’s presentation.’ Dr Samphire tries to sound reasonable in a we’re-all-men-of-the-world way.

‘Meanwhile, just to be on the safe side, you had a separate air supply installed up here.’

‘We don’t need to work as hard as our staff. We’re directors.’

The directors are in an uproar. Nobody wants to risk breathing the bad air. They are arguing among themselves, two or three heading for Ben, when Clarke appears in the stairwell doorway. He has his razor-edged cricket bat slung across his back like some kind of Home Counties bounty hunter.

‘Mr Harper reports to me,’ Clarke explains. ’I’ll enjoy taking care of this.’

With the door between June and Miranda, June fights to get the deadbolt key in the bottom lock. Half-Swan appears to have vanished into the tropical undergrowth, wriggling away like some kind of grotesque reptile. Meera chooses this moment to fall out of the tree, hanging onto the palm fronds, and lands in the soft earth. With her sari torn open, Meera increasingly looks like a Bollywood action heroine, except when she opens her mouth.

‘Jesus Fuck. Ow. Bollocks.’

June is shouting for someone to help her. Meera grabs the key and turns it, opening the door. As she does so, and pulls herself and June through, Half-Swan springs from the bushes, hauling himself along by his hands, shoving his way inside with them. He slams the door shut, turns the key in the lock and makes off with it, dragging himself away into darkness.

‘Christ, what is keeping him alive?’ asks the shocked Miranda. She turns to June, who has fallen in beside her. ‘There’s got to be another way out.’ She looks at the torn and bleeding Meera. ‘What the hell happened to you?’

‘I fell out of the building, all right? We need to find Howard.’

‘Why?’

‘Let’s just find him, okay?’

Clarke walks Ben ahead of him, goading him with the razor-sharp tip of his cricket bat. ‘This is what happens when you leave your workstation unattended.’

‘Have you seen what’s going on down there?’

‘What’s the matter, Mr Harper, are you afraid of a little hard work?’

‘It’s not the work that bothers me, it’s the mass psychosis of a building filled with deranged, homicidal maniacs.’

‘That’s the trouble with people like you, Harper. There’s always an excuse.’ He swings the bat at Ben’s throat, and somehow manages to pin him to the railings by the handle. He produces a huge roll of silver tape and starts taping Ben up.

‘You killed Felix,’ says Ben, dumbly.

‘A little man trying to hold back a big industry. People like him – people like you – don’t deserve to survive. I bet you don’t even vote.’

‘Why did you hide his body in the air-pipe?’

‘To infect the others.’ Met with an uncomprehending stare, he sighs and explains. ‘From the day I started work, I just wanted to do my job well. After thirty years of late nights and no holidays, I became a supervisor. I had no friends, no woman, no life, but it didn’t matter. I sacrificed everything for my employers. Then along came Mr Draycott …’

… Clarke studied Draycott, hating his crisp, white shirt and gym-toned chest, hating the cool, young new boy with all the answers in his report. He raised his cricket bat, and his righteous anger did the rest.

Disposing of the body was a bit of a fag, though. He had to drag, shove, fold, drop and bend Draycott to get him inside the grille, ramming him through to the steel shaft below. As the body landed with a slam, his employment papers drifted down after him. Moments later, the air-con system started up. That, of course, was the problem right there …

‘Don’t you think I knew my days were numbered?’ Clarke hisses at him. ‘All I ever wanted was a little respect. A little acknowledgement. Was that too much to ask?’

Now completely taped up, Ben is stuck at the top of the stairwell. The worst thing is having to listen to his supervisor play the sympathy card. ‘I can see how you feel,’ he says carefully. ‘If you don’t have a job in this country, people treat you like shit.’

‘They treat you like shit if you do,’ warns Clarke, somewhat mollified. ‘When I come back, I’m afraid I’m going to have to terminate your contract.’

14. FRIDAY 3:05 PM

June, Meera and Miranda are keeping an eye out for Half-Swan, who has scuttled off again. They round a corner in the basement and find Howard in his deckchair, smoking dope and listening to the Chemical Brothers on his iPod. He smiles and peace-signs them.

‘Hey guys.’ Howard wants to high-five, but nobody’s in the mood. Half-Swan is sitting on top of a tool cabinet above him, poised to drop and attack. His colon is hanging below his shirt-tails.

Meera yanks Howard’s headphones off, pulling him backwards. She and Miranda drag Howard clear into the next room as Swan throws himself at the flimsy door, hammering it hard.

‘Don’t you know what’s happening up there?’ asks Meera.

‘Holy Jesus Mother Of God! What the fuck was that?’

‘Mr Swan,’ says June. ‘The top half of him, anyway. He’s kind of dead but he won’t lie down.’

‘No shit. Oh man, I warned you. No pain receptors, your brain keeps functioning as long as they tell your heart to keep beating. I fucking knew this would happen.’

‘How did you know?’ asks Miranda.

‘Oh fuck.’ Howard looks sheepish. ‘You’re looking for someone to blame, it’s me. I designed the SymaxCorp system.’

‘You?’

‘Yeah. I started when I was still at school – didn’t come out of my room for about three years. It was all theory, of course. Dr Samphire found me and made it happen. I ran it through every conceivable scenario, then pointed out the potential problems. He had some ideas of his own about those. He wanted to keep me where he could keep an eye on me. One of his little jokes; the whizz kid becoming the janitor. I don’t mind it down here. It’s cosy.’

‘I thought the directors were to blame,’ says Miranda, disillusioned.

‘Yeah, right. Most of them couldn’t find their own dicks with a microscope and tweezers. A profound lack of imagination is the only quality you need to rule the fucking world.’

Half-Swan slams himself at the plywood door, nearly breaking through.

‘How’s he kicking the door without any legs?’ June wonders.

Miranda looks around. ‘Is there another way out of here apart from the front doors?’

‘This isn’t like one of those Alien films where they keep pulling out maps of service pipes. Duh.’ Howard rolls his eyes.

‘Come on Howard, there must be something!’

‘Well obviously there’s a rubbish chute, but you can only get to it from the atrium, ’cause that’s where they take the recycling stuff.’

‘We can get there.’

‘The tunnel’s full of rubbish.’

‘We can clear it.’

‘And it’s welded shut.’

‘I thought you designed all this?’ Miranda accuses.

‘Don’t rush me,’ says Howard. ‘Somebody roll a joint while I’m thinking,’

Ben comes to. He’s tied to a wheeled desk chair with rolls of parcel tape. His mouth is taped. Perhaps Clarke wants to keep him alive as a sympathetic ear? He tries to move the chair, but it’s at the top of the stairwell flight, and one false move will send him to his death.

There’s a loose end to the tape. There’s also a trolley ramp on the first flight of stairs. Ben manages to fix the tape around the stair-rail with one hand. He kicks back. The chair tips down the stairs, spinning on its stem as the tape unravels. But it rolls too fast, shooting off the edge of the staircase and over into the stairwell. The tape pulls tight as he falls.

Ben and chair are yanked back, to hang suspended in space by the attached tape.

Miranda, Meera, June and Howard back away from the door, which is being violently battered and is splitting in half.

Howard points ahead. ‘There’s a cable tunnel that goes as far as the lobby, but it’s not very wide.’ He eyes June as he speaks. ‘I don’t know if she’ll go through.’

‘At least try – we’ll deal with the supervisor.’ Miranda looks like she’s been waiting for something like this all her working career.

‘If you guys are sure,’ says Howard, uncertainly.

‘He hasn’t got any bloody legs, Howard, all right? We can manage.’

Howard can’t wait to get out. He takes June with him. As Miranda and Meera barricade the breaking door, a dark shape shifts behind them. They turn around to find Miss Fitch in an alcove, chopping up documents on an old-fashioned paper-guillotine. She must have been there the whole time. She’s smoking hard and slugging vodka from the bottle.

‘I have so much paperwork, you have no idea.’ Her eyes are as white as the paper she slices. ‘It’s my job to make the directors look good. I’ve been rewriting their mail and remembering their wives’ birthdays for six fucking years on a bare living wage, and what thanks do I get?’ She slams down the guillotine blade. ‘What thanks do I get?’ She shouts so hard that everyone jumps.

Fitch looks down. She has cut her wrist through to the bone. The severed artery is spraying blood everywhere. ‘Oh, for Heaven’s sake. I just had a manicure.’ She attempts to carry on working, her wrist flapping, pumping blood all around as Miranda looks on in horror.

Just then, Half-Swan breaks in and recognises Miss Fitch. He halts before her. She’s bleeding really badly. His guts are falling out. They’re not a great couple.

‘I’m a woman with feelings,’ Fitch continues, oblivious. ‘I have desires and needs. Nobody notices. It took you six years to ask me out on a date, Mr Swan. You spent the whole evening talking about work, then left me outside a kebab shop. I’ve had better nights.’

‘You’ve seen better days.’

‘This? It’s just a paper cut. Where are your legs?’

Swan looks down in some surprise. ‘What – ? Where’s the rest of me?’

‘There’s some of you in the atrium,’ Miranda tells him. ‘You are so past your sell-by date, Swan.’

Swan sighs. ‘This is where equal opportunities gets you. Women in business are such bitches.’ He makes a sudden move to strangle Fitch. Miranda spots the deadbolt key sticking out of Swan’s pocket and snatches it away. She grabs Meera and they get the hell out.

They run along the cable tunnel, emerging into the lobby, where sex and anarchy rule. It’s a scene from the uncut version of Caligula. The few members of staff who haven’t gone insane are hammering at the glass doors, trying to get out. Miranda and Meera attempt to walk through them with a little dignity. Meera tears off the lower half of her sari, which keeps catching on stuff.

They approach the doors with the deadbolt key. But just as Miranda is about to use it, a huge creature lumbers from the shadows and snatches it from her.

It is Clarke, armed with his razor-bat, his combover sticking up at a fantastic angle. Miranda screams.

‘Jameson,’ he hisses. ‘Our little company rebel. And Miss Indiana Fucking Jones. I thought I threw you out of the building.’ Miranda can see he has the key – their only means of escape.

‘What have you done with Ben?’ she asks, making a grab for the key. He holds it high above her, teasing. Then he opens his mouth and drops it in.

‘He’s swallowed it,’ says Miranda, ‘Meera, he’s swallowed it!’

15. FRIDAY 3:23 PM

Upstairs, the directors are in chaos. Some have handkerchiefs over their faces, and all are trying to get out. Two are heading for the SymaxCorp system mainframe, hoping to dismantle it somehow.

Dr Samphire looks frustrated. It’s not an emotion he’s used to. ‘There must be some way we can shut it down.’

‘You’d have to override the building’s entire power supply,’ one of the other directors explains.

‘Well whose brilliant fucking idea was that?’

The director smirks mirthlessly. ‘That would be yours, sir.’

Miranda struggles up the stairs after Meera. Clarke is locked around Miranda’s waist, dragging himself behind her like a human anchor. Remembering that she is still wearing her fashionably-pointed shoes, she twists and jams one into Clarke’s gullet. Gagging, he falls away.

Miranda sees Ben hanging over the stairwell, and runs up until she’s level with his head, ripping off his mouth tape. Then she hauls him toward her. As she’s doing so, Clarke makes a fresh grab for her, who is forced to let go of Ben’s chair.

The chair swings dangerously out across the stairwell. Miranda tries to fight off Clarke as Ben’s tape starts to break. Meera tries to grab at the swinging chair, but misses it.

Miranda gives as good as she gets, slamming Clarke into against the stairwell wall. Clarke is feeling no pain, only rage. He grabs Miranda by the throat and lifts her from the ground, choking the life from her. Ben is helpless to save her. Meera is still trying to haul him in.

Miranda is close to blacking out as Clarke’s fat fingers dig in. Ben kicks out hard, swinging the chair on its tape-rope. On his third swing, he slams into Clarke, knocking him back against the wall.

The tape breaks. Meera makes a flying save and grabs the back of Ben’s chair, but it almost pulls her over the railing. Clarke breaks free and uses the confusion to head off up the stairs.

‘Miranda!’ yells Meera. ‘I can’t hold it!’ Miranda grabs Ben just as he tears loose from the chair and Meera lets the chair go. It tumbles down into the stairwell with a clatter. Together, they pull the tape off Ben.

Ben rubs his sore mouth. ‘Where did Clarke go?’

‘Up. He swallowed the door-key.’

They run after him.

Clarke is on the floor above them.

The supervisor reaches Room 3014, and the empty window frame where Meera nearly fell to her death. Meera, Ben and Miranda are close behind, but they shoot past him in the shadowy corridors.

‘Where’s he gone?’ Meera turns. They all turn and look.

As they pass the glass wall at the end of the corridor, Ben sees the empty window-cleaning cradle outside.

‘That’s our way out of the building. Who wants to do this?’

Meera waves the idea off like a bad smell. ‘Forget it. I’ve already been outside the hard way.’

Ben finds a slim door in the wall, opens it and climbs out. He has to walk along a ledge to reach the cradle. Up here, the wind is blowing so hard that the rain is travelling sideways.

‘See if you can get anyone down to the lobby,’ he shouts. ‘I’ll meet you there from the other side, I hope.’ Ben eyes the cradle uncomfortably. He tries to operate the electric panel that works the cradle, which at least is on steel runners down the side of the building, not ropes. He has no idea how to operate it, but gamely takes off the brake.

The steel cage plunges like a roller coaster. For a moment, Ben is freefalling above it, clinging to the handrail, before he can pull himself down to slam the brake back on. The cradle slows and stops. It had dropped one floor. Ben eases off on the brake and the cradle starts to slide slowly down the building, cutting a swathe through the wind and driving rain.

One more floor and the cage suddenly jams and stops at an angle, jarring Ben to the grid floor. Far below him spin giant ventilator blades, sucking fresh air into the building for processing. He slithers to the edge of the tilted cradle, catching the ledge of the building with his outstretched hands.

At that moment, Clarke slams up against the fire escape windows beside Ben, grinning maniacally. For a man with a built-up boot, he has a way of moving damned fast when he wants something. He examines the window for a moment, testing for its weak point, then swings his bat and splinters the glass, which crazes but holds. He pulls the bat free and swings again.

This time the tip gets through, in a shower of crystalline fragments.

The cradle tilts further and Ben is left hanging on the outside of the building.

Clarke reaches through and slams down the bat – but Ben moves his hands before he can connect. The supervisor climbs on board the cradle, his blade spraying a shower of sparks as it connects with the steel braking mechanism.

The cradle unfreezes and races straight down the building, with Ben and Clarke hanging on for their lives. Moments from the bottom, the automatic safety system is triggered and slams in, slowing the cradle abruptly and flattening Ben and Clarke on its floor. As Ben rises to scramble out, Clarke brains him with the butt of the bat, knocking him into semi-consciousness.

Clarke hits the cradle’s up button, sending it skyward and knocking Ben off balance. They fight for the controls. Clarke grips his bat handle and prepares to swing for England. This should be good enough to finish the match.

‘Your innings is over,’ he warns, kicking Ben back with his orthopaedic boot. As the cradle continues its rapid ascent, he starts to push Ben over the side with the sharp edge of the bat. Ben feels a hot line of blood forming through his wet shirt. Pinned like this, unable to move, he knows he is about to die.

He sees Clarke’s raised boot coming at him and grabs it, twisting hard. Clarke screams as Ben lifts it – and him – over and out of the cradle. Leverage always wins over brute strength.

Clarke falls and slams onto the ventilator grating, where he lies stuck above the sucking fans. Ben watches as the lightweight aluminium safety bars slowly bend apart beneath his weight. Mr Clarke, senior supervisor, thirty years of faithful service in the private finance sector, is sucked into the grating, exploding as he hits the first of the fans. The supervisor’s remains hurtle around and up the ventilation shaft to his final destination.

The last of Clarke comes out of the steel rooftop chimney in a spectacular crimson fountain.

Miranda and Meera see Clarke’s minced innards rain down on the outside of the building. As the pulverised remains fall, something shiny and metallic passes them and bounces onto the roof of the atrium below.

‘Jesus,’ Miranda exclaims, ‘the key!’ She and Meera rush back to the stairwell. ‘There must be a service door onto the atrium roof.’

Ben is hanging onto the rising, still-tipped cradle. He looks up. If he doesn’t stop it, he’ll hit the top at incredible speed. He looks for the controls but finds only bare wires. It would appear that Clarke took the hand control panel with him when he fell. Ben can do nothing but wait to be flung from the cradle in the final crash.

Unless.

He sees, coming up, the broken window from which Clarke emerged. He is ascending at an incredible speed. He’ll have just one shot.

The gaping hole shoots past his feet. Ben lets go of the side of the tipped cradle and slides in through the window, just as he passes it.

16. FRIDAY 4:05PM

Meera and Miranda find Ben lying in the stairwell on the twenty eighth floor. It takes a minute to get him awake, but they succeed in pulling him to his feet.

‘We have to shut the systems down,’ he says.

‘Wait,’ says Miranda. ‘That means shutting everything down. Power. Lights. Air. The place will be sealed tight. You want to turn it into a big steel coffin full of raving maniacs?’

Meera shrugs. ‘It works for me.’

They head back to the top floor and room 3014. Miranda opens the master control panel and looks around for some way of disarming it. ‘This needs the female touch,’ she warns, smashing a steel chair into the system, which makes no difference at all. Meera stops her and follows the cabling to a DANGER: LIVE VOLTAGE box. She unclips the lid, overrides the protector panel and removes a water cooler tank, emptying the whole lot into the mains.

There are several small explosions and a lot of sparks, but the air system reroutes again and remains on, its gauges moving even further into overcompensation. Throughout the building, floor by floor, the lights go out and the windows darken.

Miranda stands up and brushes herself down. ‘Nice one,’ she says, sarcastically. ‘Terrific. This top was brand new. We can’t stop it. Now what do we do?’

‘Get the key back. Get the hell out.’

Meera heads off after the key.

17. FRIDAY 4:17PM

The directors watch as the mainframe diverts itself to keep running. They are panicked and still trying not to inhale the atmosphere, although it’s hopeless pretending you won’t breathe. ‘There must be some way to turn the damned air off,’ Dr Samphire insists.

‘Ultimately, it’s designed to reroute itself to an outside power supply if there’s a crisis. It can’t be turned off.’ This from the same smartarse director who was rude to him before. When this is over …

‘What you’re telling me is we’re fucked. That boy. He knew what was wrong. You have to find him.’

The other director looks disgusted. What happened to ‘we’? he wonders.

The work-floor is a very different place now. The air is as thick and as murky as the bottom of a pond. The windows have automatically darkened, screening out the light. In the hazy beam of Miranda’s torch, lunatics flit past in various states of undress. The building is a heathen hell, where small fires burn on desks. The few remaining computers are smashed in. Some of the sprinklers are on. There are moans and screams in the dark. Bedlam was an oasis of sanity by comparison.

Ben is still suffering from the effects of his fall. Miranda searches for survivors. Hearing a whimpering sound from under one of the desks, she finds a battered but still-living friend.

‘June?’ She helps her out from the crawlspace. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I think so.’

They are heading for the stairwell door when Miss Fitch reappears in front of them, lurching out of the semi-gloom. Her hair is standing on end. She’s trailing a computer keyboard, and has sellotape stuck all over her, with scissors, pens, and other bits of office equipment hanging from her body. Her cut wrist flops uselessly. She’s covered in coagulating blood.

‘Where do you two think you’re going? Have you finished all your work?’

‘There’s no more work to do. It’s over.’

Fitch, with her good hand, plucks some fluff from her sweater in annoyance. ‘You know, ever since you came here, there’s been disruption and insubordination. All this is your fault. If you hadn’t started trying to upset the status quo, we wouldn’t be trapped in here now.’

June taps Miranda on the shoulder. Miranda turns around. The deranged staff from her floor are standing behind Fitch in a semi-circle, watching the pair of them. The weaker ones always wait for a leader to emerge. It pays to be on the winning side.

Fitch works the crowd. ‘You see what she’s done? She’s destroyed your careers! Why isn’t she affected? You can’t let her get away with this!’

The crowd surges forward, backing Miranda and June against the stairwell doors. The girls slip through, dragging Ben with them, jamming the handles shut on the other side with a chair leg – but it won’t hold for long.

Miranda, Ben and June intend to head down the stairs, but another group of Bedlamites, this one in the mob colours now adopted by the accountancy floor, are on the way up.

The trio are forced to go up, not down. They hear the noise of the angry mob below them. The doors are smashed apart with fire-axes. Miranda grabs the partially-comatose Ben and smacks him hard in the face, causing him to revive a little. They are forced to continue upwards as the doors below burst open, and the Workforce of the Living Dead attack.

Have you ever been in an office where there’s a hostile environment? Now imagine that times a million. And give them all weapons.

The angry lynch-mob, led by Fitch, Half-Swan and the remaining supervisors, move fast. Ben, June and Miranda whack them back, knocking them down only to see them rise again. They’re only just managing to stay ahead. Somehow they reach the directors’ floor and get inside, barricading the stairwell doors behind them. Two of the directors are still there.

‘If you’ve got any bright ideas about how to get out of here, now’s the time to suggest them,’ says Miranda. The directors look helplessly at one another. So much for executive decisions. Miranda checks Ben’s eyes. They’re clouding over. Didn’t he once have a nervous breakdown? She doesn’t like the look of him. He needs to be taken outside into the fresh air, fast.

‘What’s above us?’ asks June.

One of the directors looks at her as if she’s mad. ‘The roof, you stupid bitch. There’s no way down from there.’

‘Even if we could get back down,’ June tells Miranda, ‘we still don’t have the door key.’

‘Then we have to make our stand here.’

18. FRIDAY 4:28PM

As they speak, Meera has located the service door and is stepping out onto the glass roof of the atrium, which is still slippery with pieces of shredded Clarke. The key is lying on a vast, unsupported pane of cracked glass. As Meera ventures towards it, the pane starts to splinter like ice on a lake. This isn’t in my job description, she thinks, dropping flat on the glass and starting to inch her way across it. The key seems miles away.

Upstairs, the last stand is taking place.

June, Ben and Miranda are as prepared as they’ll ever be. The two directors are sheltering behind them. ‘They’re coming through,’ yells June. As the remaining barrier between the sane and the insane starts to splinter, Miranda turns on the two cowering directors. ‘We should just throw you out there to die.’

‘Don’t do that! I’m in a position to grant promotion,’ promises some gormless-looking guy in a grey Burtons suit. ‘I’m a very powerful man!’

Miranda looks at his groin. ‘I think you’ve pissed yourself,’ she points out.

The other director tries to reason. ‘They’re our employees. They’ll listen to us. They’ll still recognise the voice of a superior, surely?’

His colleague opens the door to get out. ‘Surely? Fuck you, college boy, I’m out of here!’ Then, too late, he realises what he’s done.

The mob is through the doors now and pouring in, a screaming mass of blank-eyed workforce insanity. Ben tries to help the directors, but it’s too late. The angry horde pours in around the shattered door, falling on the two men. They set about tearing their bosses limb from limb.

‘Stop!’ shout the directors. ‘Think of your careers! You’ll never work in this town again! We’re in a position to grant you substantial financial awards!’ But they still die horribly. By the time their attackers have finished, the room looks like an abattoir. Ben, Miranda and June are forced to run again.

There’s an extremely stylish Colefax & Fowler executive bathroom at the end of the corridor. The trio barricade themselves inside.

‘Now what do we do?’ asks Ben.

‘I don’t know. The doors won’t hold long.’ Miranda senses someone behind her. She slowly turns. ‘June –’

The white-eyed June jumps onto her back with a furious scream. Ben slams them both back into the wall behind, knocking June off-balance, but she’s back on her feet in seconds and fighting viciously. She hurls Miranda aside and attacks Ben.

June cracks Ben’s head against the sink – again – again. Water from the taps is spraying everywhere. Ben kicks June’s feet out from under her. She slips on the wet floor and is impaled by the roof of her mouth on one of the taps. Red water pumps from her lips.

‘Jesus – June –’ Ben fearfully examines June’s eyes. ‘It’s some final stage of poisoning.’

‘The air – the ventilation shaft goes all the way down, doesn’t it?’ Miranda looks up at the wall ventilation unit. Ben climbs up onto a sink and starts hammering at the grille, but it’s sealed shut. He desperately looks around the bathroom. As the shouts outside get louder, he grabs one of the heavy cistern lids and starts slamming it into the grille.

It bursts open just as the bathroom door starts coming apart. He pushes Miranda up, and then climbs in after her.

They start along the wide pipe, which meets up with the main ventilator shaft – a sheer vertiginous drop of hundreds of feet. The only way down is via a thin steel maintenance ladder. Above, they can hear the nightmarish sounds of the invading workers.

Miranda stops dead. ‘I can’t do it, Ben, not again. I’ve got no strength left.’

‘You have to,’ he says simply. He attempts to carry her, but she’s awkward and nervous. He slips and falls. They land on the outcrop of another shaft twelve feet down.

He doggedly picks her up, but finds he’s damaged his leg badly. Above them, the first of the crazed workers – could it be Mr Beamish from Costings and Estimates? – arrives through the pipe and plunges past them into the shaft. As he falls, he makes a grab for Miranda and very nearly pulls her in with him, but Ben hangs onto her for dear life. She leads the way down – but the section of ladder suddenly ends. It’s a distance of at least twenty feet to where the next section starts.

‘That’s it,’ says Ben, ‘We’re screwed.’

‘At least we were going down this time.’

There’s a tunnel opening to their left. It’s a swing and a drop, but now they’re beyond caring for their own safety. Ben kicks out the grating at the end of it.

They land in the corridor of the deserted ninth floor, and head toward the stairwell. Ben can barely walk. Somewhere above them are eerie booms and screams, all manner of mayhem.

At least the coast looks clear. They continue their descent through smoke, past smaller fires. Shadowy figures dash past ahead. They are in still in the realm of nightmares. Eight floors, one after the other. There’s hardly anyone left alive, and certainly no-one sane.

On the ground floor of the stairwell, someone emerges very slowly and silently from the shadows. His face is blackened with ash, and his wide eyes are a hard, dead white. He learned stealth from an early age. There’s nothing like inherited wealth for instilling guile. A huge hunting rifle is beside him, an extension of his arm.

Dr Samphire might not realise it, but he’s showing how he earned his nickname of Dracula.

Ben and Miranda hobble down the stairs. Above them, crazies are starting to spill into the stairwell. The frenzied staffers are gaining on them. In great pain, Ben drags himself on, with Miranda trying to speed him up.

‘We won’t be able to get out at the bottom,’ he shouts.

‘What the fuck else can we do?’ she yells. ‘You want to stay up there and die?’

They reach the staircase above the ground floor of the stairwell. Dr Samphire slinks back into the shadows, watching and waiting for his moment.

They start running through the darkened ground floor. Ahead, its doors wide open, is the great glass atrium with its tropical forest of real and fake plants.

They look up and are amazed to see that the key is still there on the atrium roof. A few feet away from it is Meera, stranded on crazed patterns of cracked glass. She’s almost there, but can go no further.

As Ben and Miranda run into the atrium, Dr Samphire steps from between the lurid artificial palm trees, the rifle across his chest. He’s making a last stand in the business jungle.

They can’t go forward – and, thanks to the angry mob pouring into the ground floor behind them, they can’t go back.

‘Well, well.’ Dr Samphire doesn’t look at all happy with them. ‘Disruption, chaos, anarchy, disorder. Another great temple of commerce brought to its knees by people who don’t know the meaning of an honest day’s work. I hope you’re very pleased with yourselves.’ He walks toward them calmly, raising the rifle high. Think of them as deer, he tells himself, or grouse. Ben tries to get out of the way, but his leg lets him down and he falls.

The chairman fires the rifle. The bullet splinters a palm trunk. There is an ominous creaking noise. It grows, accompanied by a great rustling.

‘You can’t build the world by yourselves, so you come to us and whine when it doesn’t turn out how you wanted,’ the Chairman continues. ‘You’re shocked because people want to make money from your ideas. You half-heartedly try to stop them, picketing the headquarters of McDonald’s or Coca Cola. You forget that the world prefers standardisation and dull efficiency. It’s what your average, telly-ogling proles crave most of all, something boring that does the job and never changes, and they’re prepared to give up most of their rights to get it.’

Ben and Miranda are frozen on the spot. Ben looks up and sees that Meera is still reaching for the key.

Dr Samphire follows his eyeline and aims the rifle at the girl on the roof. He wishes he’d brought his glasses with him. He fires. Meera falls in an explosion of glass and with a cry of: ‘Jesus Bollocks Son Of A Bitch, not again!’

Ben and Miranda pull Meera from fake ferns and polystyrene-ball earth. As Dr Samphire takes aim once more, he is joined by Fitch and Half-Swan. What a trio they make.

‘It always comes down to this,’ he tells them. ‘Management versus the workforce. Compared with the next generation of wage-slaves, we’re radical socialists.’ Dr Samphire splits the palm trunk again with his rifle shot. He fires at his staff as they break through into the undergrowth.

Management picks its targets. Fitch attacks Miranda. Half-Swan goes for Ben. Dr Samphire goes after Meera.

Ben’s had enough of his half-supervisor. ‘Let’s see what you’re made of,’ he suggests, thrusting his hand up inside Half-Swan and pulling down hard. Swan screams, and Ben swings him around, knocking his brains out on a painted concrete tree trunk.

Ben feels better. Killing someone seems to have cleared his head. ‘Anybody else want a piece?’ he asks, over-confidently.

Miranda tackles Fitch, slamming her to the ground. ‘You know,’ she tells her, ‘we could have been friends if you hadn’t tried so hard to be one of the boys.’ She slugs her as you would a man, a one-two shot, first one hard in the stomach then a haymaker to the chin, sending her flying off into the bushes and out for the count. ‘I saw that in a Tarantino film,’ she explains proudly.

Dr Samphire comes after Meera, and gets a clear shot. Meera is against a wall – there’s nowhere left to run.

The Chairman points accusingly. ‘You – you’re the worst. When we had an Empire, we owned people like you. And this – this – is the thanks we get.’

He goes to fire, but Meera is free to unleash her formidable martial skills, fairly flying at him with her feet and catching him under the chin. Dr Samphire is fast, though. He has the rifle back in his cradled arm in seconds. Ben knows the Chairman can take them out. He has to do something drastic.

Ben steps forward and raises a placating hand, as Miranda shouts at him.

‘This is what I wanted, Miranda,’ he says. ‘I told you that, the first day. I’m with you, Dr Samphire. Let me help you, and together we can get SymaxCorp back on track.’ He walks over to Dr Samphire’s side and takes a stand against Miranda and Meera. They can’t believe what they’re seeing.

The Chairman loves moments like this in the business world. It makes him proud to have been an advisor to both Mrs Thatcher and Mr Blair. ‘You chose the victorious side, son. Most sensible. It proves that even someone like you can become a captain of industry.’

As soon as he is close enough, Ben reaches over and grabs the barrel of Dr Samphire’s rifle.

The weapon goes off, skimming Ben’s arm to plant a third split in the fake palm behind him.

As Ben drops, the great tree comes down. It was never meant to withstand gunfire. As it falls, its concrete sections break apart. The top piece lands squarely on Dr Samphire’s head, pulverising his skull into a skillet of bone, pounding him into the ground.

Miranda runs to Ben’s side as the deranged Bedlamites, no longer held back by the stand-off, pour into the atrium.

‘Fucking arseholes.’ Meera has taken to swearing a lot lately. ‘Time to go. Did Howard say whether or not the cable tunnel connected to the outside?’

Meera locates the recycling door to the outside world and finds that it’s not welded shut after all. Perhaps that was just another lie they fed Howard. Exhausted, they drag themselves inside the tunnel.

Meera checks her watch as they are chased through the claustrophobic tunnel, the mob grabbing and clawing at them. Almost five, nearly time to go home, she can’t help thinking. She’s always been a city girl.

They emerge, bloodied, burned, scarred, half-naked, in the light of a blazing, blood-red sunset. The rain has stopped. They look back to see the white-eyed staff falling back from the bright tunnel exit like roaches.

‘I don’t think they want to breathe normal air any longer,’ says Meera. ‘The doctored stuff is addictive, after all. They’ll have to stay inside.’

Behind them, above them, crazed workers hammer silently on the building windows. Something flares and explodes deep inside – but the outside world fails to notice. The tower has become a permanent monument to synaptic disorder, horror, misery, chaos. Perhaps, on a lesser scale, it always was.

‘I think maybe it’s time to give up my desk job,’ says Meera.

Miranda wipes her face. ‘Yeah, this won’t look too good on your CV.’

They are walking away, they are free, they are safe … until the tunnel exit bursts open behind them, and a hundred desperate hands claw out. Somehow – they don’t know how it happens, it’s something that will haunt them forever – some of the hands seize Ben’s jacket, and he is hauled back inside. Ben fights furiously as the tunnel shadows swallow him, until he can fight no more. He allows himself to be carried back, all the way into the building’s dark heart.

Miranda’s screams frighten seagulls above the river.

Meera is forced to pull her away from the outer wall. Around them, home-going commuters move in a solid river, barely pausing to give them notice.

A passing drone complains on his mobile: ‘I’m going to have to cancel. I just had a really tough day at work.’ Meera shoots him a look. She finds herself still holding Ben’s tie. Sadly, she drops it into a nearby litter bin.

Miranda is crying hard. ‘Poor Ben,’ she says, ‘it was the thing he most wanted.’ She doesn’t seem able to stop the ragged sobs. ‘He wanted to be like everyone else in the city.’

The limping, wounded pair gradually merge with the flow of people.

FIVE MONTHS LATER

In the smart, white corporate office, the board meeting comes to an end.

One of the US executives is wrapping up his presentation. ‘Due to the unfortunate circumstances surrounding the closure of our London office,’ he announces, ‘worldwide operations will now be based here in Chicago. The investigation has revealed much that we can learn from past mistakes, and we are completely satisfied that it’s impossible for such a problem to arise again. Additionally, I am pleased to announce that SymaxCorp Environment Systems has been awarded the chance to pitch for contracts across all US government buildings.’ The office rings to the sound of polite applause.

ONE YEAR AND THREE MONTHS LATER

In the Oval Office of the White House, the President pores over papers on his desk. Above him, tiny air vents open, and there’s a gentle, almost comforting hiss. The new unit above his head has a steel label on the edge of the grille. It reads: SYMAXCORP USA.

The President likes it when the fresh air starts up. He always seems to get so much more done. Humming softly to himself, he turns his attention back to the plans for North Korea.