Fire and ice

8:31 a.m

Matt had to get to Shipping and Receiving and warn Shelly, and everybody else, that there was a killer on the loose. He felt his way down the staircase. When he reached the bottom, he took a right. With one hand touching the wall and the other out in front of him, he blindly made his way to the walkway door. He felt the push-button lock and punched in the code.

Then he heard footsteps.

And keys jingling.

Someone was coming his way-fast.

Matt wanted to enter the walkway and make a dash for the production area, but the footsteps were approaching too quickly. He got on his hands and knees and backtracked until he felt the hallway that led to the Human Resources office. He turned the corner and backed in a few feet, and he heard the footsteps coming and the keys jingling but he didn’t see any light. How was the killer walking so fast without a flashlight?

He hunkered down and held his breath. If the killer looked to his right as he walked past the hallway leading to HR, Matt was as good as dead.

8:33 a.m.

Shelly switched the flashlight off to save battery power. She and Fred Philips and Hal Miller sat in complete darkness.

Fred was the junior member of the troupe and had been with Nitko for only a few weeks. “Anything like this ever happen before?” he said.

Like what? Shelly thought. Like thinking you’ve hit bottom and then everything goes to shit? Only every day of my life.

“We have drills sometimes,” Shelly said. “But the procedure is to get everyone out of the plant before initiating emergency lockdown. I’m sure you saw the safety videos when you were on orientation.”

“I kinda slept through some of those videos,” Fred said. “So you think this is a drill?”

“I don’t know what it is. I think-”

“It’s some sort of test,” Hal said. “The Old Bastard is testing us, trying to see who freaks out under pressure. I guarantee you Drew and all the other supervisors are in on it. The best thing we can do is sit here and calmly wait it out.”

“I ain’t sitting here forever,” Fred said. “If Drew ain’t back soon, I’m bailing.”

“Where you going to go? The whole damn place is sealed up like a Mason jar.”

“I’ll find my way out of this place somehow.”

“We’re the Old Bastard’s playthings,” Hal said. “Can’t you see that? He makes over a million dollars a year while we struggle to make ends meet, and now he’s going to toy with us like a kid catching fireflies. I guarantee you that’s all this is. Think about it. The suits are having a good laugh about now, thinking about us peons sitting around in the dark. I guarantee you-”

“Shh,” Shelly said. “Did you guys hear that?”

“Hear what?” Fred said.

“I thought I heard something. Like a door slamming or something. Listen.”

Everyone shut up and listened for a minute, but the only sound they heard was the battery-operated clock hanging on Drew Long’s office wall. The plant was as void of sound now as it was of light, and a disturbing thought streaked across Shelly’s consciousness like a lightning bolt.

The ventilation fans.

With the power off, the fans were off, and that meant the chemical fumes would accumulate unchecked. Eventually the fumes would displace the oxygen, and everyone trapped in the plant would suffocate. Shelly had no idea how long that would take, but her guess was a few hours tops. And even before the fresh air ran out completely, the fumes would start making people sick. They would become weak and vomit and have seizures and suffer agonizing head-to-toe pain. Just thinking about it put a knot in her stomach.

So much for dying slowly instead of dying quickly, she thought. One last fucking brilliant choice to cap off the life list.

“I don’t hear nothing,” Fred said.

“Maybe it was just my imagination. Fred, I think you’re right. We can’t just sit here and wait forever. If Drew isn’t back in a few minutes, I say we try to escape.”

“And just how do you suggest we do that?” Hal said.

“The ventilation fans.”

“Huh?”

“We could climb up there somehow and take the grates off and then crawl through. Maybe one of you guys could raise me up with a forklift.”

“Sounds like a damn good idea to me,” Fred said.

“It’s forty feet up, and then forty feet down on the other side,” Hal said. “What are you going to do, take a parachute with you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we can make a rope out of stretch wrap or something.”

“Even if all that works, there’s still a problem with the idea. Two of us might be able to get out, but the third would be stuck with nobody to operate the forklift. The third wouldn’t have any way to get up to the fans.”

“Only one of us needs to get out,” Shelly said. “Then whoever it is can find a telephone and call for help.”

“Hell yeah,” Fred said. “There’s all kinds of houses and businesses around here. I say we go for it. I’ll even volunteer to be the one to crawl through and rappel down the other side.”

“What if the power comes back on while you’re crawling through?” Hal said. “The fan blades will cut you in half.”

“What’s the likelihood of that happening? A million to one? Fuck it. I’ll take the chance.”

“Hal has a point,” Shelly said. “I never even thought about the power coming back on. And even if that doesn’t happen, which it probably won’t, it’s still going to be a risky operation. Maybe we better just wait a while and think it over. Maybe there’s another way.”

“Y’all can sit here and wait if you want to,” Fred said. “I’m getting out.”

“Just stay put for a few minutes. You can’t get up to the fans by yourself anyway. Drew will probably be back any second. Then we’ll see what he thinks.”

“Turn that flashlight on for a second,” Hal said. “We got trucks coming in later. I want to see what time it is.”

Shelly switched the flashlight on and pointed it at the clock. It was