Horror At The Office

         Tonight I dreamt about a small fishing boat on the ocean. There was nothing surrounding the boat but the vast blue of the all-encompassing sea. But the ocean wasn’t blue. It was black and grimy.
         There was a man on the boat. He was wearing the simple attire of a fisherman. He sat there for a minute, gazing into the horizon. Then he reached under his feet and brought out a bucket. The bucket was full of an array of fish guts. He then brought out a stack of wax paper and a roll of twine. And some copper weights.
         He set all of these things before him and started to arrange the objects in order of biggest to smallest. After doing so, he took out a piece of wax paper and placed it on his lap. Then he reached into the bucket of chum and took out a handful of fish guts. He placed what he had on the piece of wax paper. Then he wrapped the edges of the paper over the guts. He then reached in front of him and got the roll of twine. He wrapped the twine around the little package of fish guts and then tied it into a knot at the top, careful not to tie it too tight or squeeze the guts out of the paper. After he had finished this task, he took one of the copper weights and tied it with a little bit of twine to the knot on the package. After all this was done, he simply tossed the package over the right side of the boat.
         He did this for a while, completely absorbed in his task. He would always make sure he used up certain amounts of the supplies, so he would not have any extra left over. But it seemed that he never did run out of supplies, because no matter how deep he reached into the bucket, he would find more fish chum.
         Occasionally he would look out into the horizon again, and perhaps gather his thoughts. Each time he did this though; his eyes had become more and more shrouded with white. Although seemingly blind, he would go back to work and do every part of his task with expert precision. However, because he was losing his eyesight, he failed to see the steadily increasing number of dorsal fins start to surround the rickety old fishing boat. The man would just keep throwing the chum over the side of the boat and keep attracting the predators of the sea. Eventually the sun went down, and that is when they attacked…

         The alarm went off at six. I sat up, and wiped the cold sweat off my forehead. Then I sat there a minute, trying to remember my dream. It seemed important for a fleeting second. Then the moment was over and I swung my feet out of bed.
         It was a Tuesday morning, and it was quite unremarkable. I watched the news and the forecast was a little cloudy with a slight chance of rain. While I was brushing my teeth, I watched a brief news report on the big flu virus going around. It warned me that it was very contagious and to seek a doctor immediately if I saw any symptoms in myself. But I felt just fine, so I flipped off the TV and got dressed.
         Traffic was hell. I wonder if any one has ever committed suicide while slowly moving through a claustrophobic number of cars inches at a time. Wouldn’t be surprised if anyone did. Sometimes I felt like it, that’s for sure.
         I got to the office a little earlier than expected, so I took advantage of it and got to park a little closer to the building. I stepped out onto the faded pavement and looked at the sky. It did not look that cloudy, if anything it just looked a little gray. I could even see the sun a little bit through some lighter patches. Today might not be so bad after all.
         I swiped my ID card and got into the building. It was a little chilly inside, so I kept my jacket on. I thought to myself, I’ll mention something about that to maintenance later. I walked to the elevator and pressed the UP button. The doors opened and I stepped in.
         At the third floor the doors opened and Ike stepped in. He was my best friend at the office, and probly the funniest guy I knew. His jokes are most likely the only things that can make me smile in the morning. Or any other time really.
         “Hey, Tom, did you here about Jim’s escapades over the weekend?”
         “Jim the janitor?”
         “Yeah, that asshole,” he laughed, “He got a DUI over the weekend.”
         I laughed a little to myself. “Well, I am not the least bit surprised.”
         We reached the fifth floor and we both got out. Ike and I worked in the same department, on the same floor, and on the same side of the building. If we didn’t, I don’t think we would have been friends. I don’t get out a lot, and I’m not very social.
         We both walked to the little coffee/break room before we went to our cubicles. He took two creams and two sugars with his coffee. I just drank mine straight. I never liked to put anything in my coffee, or buy that weird frapachino-expresso bullshit either. But some people do.  Coffee is coffee I guess.
         “So Ike,” I said once we had sat down, “why were you down on the third floor?”
         “Well,” he smiled, “you know Tracy from marketing?”
         I looked at him. “Yeah?”
         “Well, you know how last Friday night we had to work late on the Emerson Project?”
         “…Yeah?”
         “You know when I said I had needed a bathroom break?”
         “Uh…Yeah…?”
         “Remember when I didn’t come back for another hour?”
         “Well, I just assumed that maybe you were…”
         “Taking a dump?”
         “Well, whatever you do in the bathroom is your business but…”
         “Well, I wasn’t in the bathroom.”
         “Well then where were you?”
         He gave me a look. “God man, can’t you put anything together yourself?”
         It suddenly hit me. “No, you…you…”
         “Yeah, I banged her in her office.”
         I spit up a little bit of my coffee. “You did what?”
         Ike gave me another look. “What, did you expect me to invite her up to my cubicle?”
         “But…you can’t do that with another employee…”
         “Well, I did.”
         I shook my head. “Okay, well what were you doing down on the third floor this morning then?”
         Ike sighed and leaned back in his plastic chair. “Well, apparently Tracy felt a little uncomfortable about what happened and told Mr. Elkmer…”
         Again, I choked on my coffee.
         Ike looked at me. “Man, you have to stop drinking while I’m talking.”
         “Mr. Elkmer is the head of the whole building!”
         “Man, I know. He called me down there this morning to discuss what happened with Tracey.”
         “And?”
         “Well, we reached an agreement not to do anything too serious. We apologized and decided to just not to talk about it again.”
         I sighed. “Well, that is good, I thought maybe something really bad was going to happen.”
         “Well…”
         I looked at him. “What?”
         “…Part of the agreement was that we have to have a sexual harassment seminar today.”
         “Jesus Ike!”
         “I’m sorry, I can’t help it.”
After spending some more time in the break room with Ike, I left to go to my cubicle. I turned on my computer to check my email. It was what I always did first in the morning. Sure enough, there was an email from Mr. Elkmer about the seminar. It was to start at noon in the large group instruction room on the second floor.
         I also said hello to Stacy, her cubicle was right next to mine. She was the prettiest girl in the whole floor. She was also very quite and always got her projects done on time. I kind of had a little crush on her, if you could call it that. I never had made any move towards her though, God knows we don’t need another seminar anytime soon. So, I just said Hi and went about my business, and smiled as I watched her walk into her cubicle.
         I looked at my watch. It was ten in the morning. This was going to seriously hurt the progress on the Emerson Project. I shivered a little and thought I should put on my jacket. I looked for it a little bit before realizing that I was still wearing it.
I decided I would call maintenance and ask them about turning on the heat. After all, it was the middle of November. I dialed the number for Jim’s office. A gruff voice picked up the phone.
         “Hello?”
         “Uh…Jim?”
         “Yup, that’s me. Who’s this?”
         “Uhm…this is Thomas Craig, from accounting.”
         “Okay.”
         “Well, I was wondering…”
         “I bet you’re wondering if I could turn the heat on, aye Tom?”
         “Well, yes, that’s what I was going to…”
         “Well, that’s on the list.”
         “The list?”
         “Yup, of things to fix today.”
         “Well…”
         “I’m the only Janitor left. Everyone else is sick with that flu that’s going around.”
         “Well, I’m sorry…”
         “Yup, I got too many things to fix today. In addition to the heat, the power is out on the first floor, the lights on the stairs are out, and there is an overflow on the sixth floor. I’m gonna be up to my knees in it.”
         “Uhm…well I’m real sorry, I’ll let you get back to…”
         “Say, did you here anything about my DUI over the weekend?”
         I paused. “Well, I might have heard…”
         “Because it ain’t true!”
         I sighed. “Well, okay Jim, I have to go get to work. Sorry about everything you…”
         “Who told you anyway, huh? Was it the Ike prick?”
         I hung up the phone on him. Jim had a certain reputation around here. Mostly just as a hot head, but there were other rumors. Rumors that he was an ex-convict. Rumors that he had killed his wife. But, I don’t think those are true. Mostly I try to stay away from him though.
         I tried to wrap up the Emerson Project’s financial history, but it was just too much for me. I needed more time if I wanted to get it done on schedule. I looked down and I saw that I had the pig-shaped stress ball my mother had given me for Christmas one year in my hand. I let go of it and slowly watched it regain its shape. I thought it was time for a break.
         I started to walk to the break room, but then thought better of it. Instead, I walked to the other side of the floor to the men’s restroom. It seemed to me like they should put more than just two bathrooms on one floor. If someone got sick and they worked on the complete other side of the floor, like me, they would have to get up and run across the whole accounting wing to the bathroom at the other side. It just creates a scene.
         I walked inside to the tiled floor and the distant echoing of my footsteps on it. I always had liked that sound, but never really understood why. It had something to do with the feeling that I had the whole place to myself. I had always liked solitude.
         I walked over to the sink and splashed some cool water on my face. Then I looked at my face in the mirror. What I saw shocked me a little bit. My eyes had dark grey circles under them, and my face had a set frown on it. Although I didn’t know I was frowning. I blinked my eyes a couple times but my perception did not change. I thought about maybe taking it a little bit easier on myself, but then I changed my mind. I would be fine, I had been doing the same work for over ten years now. It’s not going to kill me.
         I walked back to my cubicle and looked at my watch. It was a quarter till twelve. The loudspeaker came on and Mr. Elkmer’s voice echoed through the building, “Ladies and gentlemen, please make your way down to the L.G.I. room for the seminar scheduled today. We will begin at twelve. That is all.”
         I turned off my computer and left my cubicle. On the way to the elevator I met Ike.
         “How are you getting along with the Emerson Project?” I asked.
         He shrugged. “I haven’t started yet.”
         “What?”
         “Well, I figured there would be plenty of time this week…”
         “But we have to have it finished by Thursday!”
         “Oh, I thought it was Monday.”
         “No…god Ike…”
         He sighed. “Relax, will you?” Then Ike took a left before the elevators, towards the stairs.
         “What are you doing?” I asked.
         He gave me a look. “The stairs will be faster.”
He was right. I looked ahead of me to where the elevators were and saw they were blocked up pretty bad with the whole floor trying to get on. There was already a small crowd forming a line.
         “Screw that,” Ike said.
         I looked at him. “But the lights are out on the stairs.”
         “I thought they would be, and that’s why I brought this.” He took out a long flashlight, the kind that made a light as bright as headlights when you turn it on.
         “Where did you get that?” I asked.
         “The janitor’s closet.”
         “When were you in the janitor’s closet?”
         “Well, remember Grace from the Christmas party…”
         “Whatever, I don’t want to know.”
         We got to the stairs and opened the door. Beyond the doorway was total darkness. Ike turned on his flashlight and we started to walk down the stairs to the second floor. We walked at a slow pace, and I kept looking at the light and the way it moved slowly over the steps of the stairway. I started to feel hypnotized by the circle of light the flashlight created. As it moved over the steps, it created weird shadows in a strange bobbing pattern. For just a moment, I had a moment of realization; this wasn’t how I wanted to live my life. I didn’t want to spend all of my years being an accountant. I wanted to do something important. But then, we reached the bottom, and Ike turned off the light. Whatever I had been thinking before vanished with the light into the darkness.
         Before we left the stairwell, I thought I heard something coming from the first floor. It sounded like someone was scraping off something they stepped on with their shoe. I also thought I heard a moan. Whether of pleasure of pain I wasn’t sure. But, I decided to let it go as a figment of my imagination.
         We got to the L.G.I room fairly easily; most of the people were already there. We got a seat towards the back, because Ike said he didn’t want them to get pissed off if they saw him napping. We waited a few minutes before everyone finally got in.
         Mr. Elkmer got up to deliver his speech, while a PowerPoint slideshow displayed the points he was talking about with bulletins and bold letters in some cases. I found my mind wandering, and soon my gaze as well. It was then that I noticed something was off. It seemed like there were a smaller number of us then there should be. There were too many empty seats.
         I bumped Ike awake and asked him if he had seen anything weird.
         “Huh?”
         “Don’t you think there should be more people here than there already are?”
         “Well…” he looked around.
         I looked around again as well. And I noticed something.
         “Hey, do you see anyone from the first floor here?” I asked.
         “I…” he looked around again. “No, come to think of it, I don’t.”
         “I wonder…” A thought came to me. “Well, Jim did say that the power was out on the first floor.”
         “Jim the Janitor?” Ike asked.
         “Yeah, I called down to ask him about the heat.”
         “Good, it’s too damn cold.”
         “Well, he said that all the other janitors had gotten that flu virus…”
         “Oh yeah, my neighbor had that.”
         “Really?”
         “Yeah, he died last week.”
         “Whoa, oh my god…”
         “Eh, he was an asshole. Always leaving his grass clippings too close to my yard.”
         “Jesus…I didn’t think people were really dying from it…”
         “Oh yeah, I even heard they have started to burn the bodies.”
         “What?”
         “Yeah, something about them being to contagious or something like that. I don’t know, its all government bullshit.”
Ted, one of the security guards at the building, got a loud crackle over his radio. It was indistinguishable, but he walked out into the hallway so as not to disturb the seminar. About five minutes after he had left, a loud scream interrupted Mr. Elkmer. Everyone turned around to look at who screamed, but they were distracted by what she was screaming at. This is when things happened very quickly, and no one could have been less prepared than a bunch of accountants and actuaries at a sexual harrasment seminar. 
         A man with ragged cloths walked through the center isle of the L.G.I room. His skin was grey, and blood dripped down from his closed mouth. Everything else was normal about him except his nose. Where one used to be, there was now a gaping whole.  He then made a sound that sounded very much like the moaning I heard in the stairwell.
         Mr. Elkmer called for security, and as if to answer him, three loud gunshots rang out in the hallway. There was a loud bang as the door was kicked in. Several more grey-skinned monstrosities loomed in the doorway. I recognized one of them to be Tabitha, the receptionist. They all had fresh blood on their office clothes and each one of them had a some sort of bloody wound on their bodies. Tabitha had a huge chunk of her neck missing, while the man standing next to her was missing part of his cheek and his eyes. The one who stood in the center aisle turned his head to his friends and made a series of guttural clicking sounds. Then something happened that no one saw coming. They charged for the podium at a full run.
         The whole room erupted into pandemonium. People started running for the doors, but more of the grey things came in. It looked as if the whole first floor had re-joined the seminar all right. Glenda, from the same floor I worked on, was the first witnessed casualty. The thing with no nose grabbed onto her and bit into her shoulder. Soon she was on the ground while the thing moved to someone else, Todd from marketing.
         I turned to Ike wide eyed and asked, “What should we do?”
         “There is a door,” he said, while running towards the stage, “up to the left of the podium. We’ll go through there.”
         I followed him to the door. A few other people saw what we were doing and followed us as well. Pretty soon though, we had a couple of the grey skinned things following them. And after them was only death.
         We ran through the maze of cubical on the second floor. There were screams from behind us as those things picked off the slow or weak in the back. As we reached the elevators, Ike turned towards the stairs again. I shouted at him.
         “Ike, what are you doing?”
         He looked back at me, panting. “We have to use the stairs again,” he said.
         “I think it would be better if we…”
         But I was too later. Ike opened the door to the stairs and started to walk in, flashlight in hand. As soon as he turned it on, he illuminated the bodies of around twenty of those things, though the light made it look like thousands. Ike almost had time to scream before the first hand fell on him. After that, he was swept away into the stairway. I grabbed his flashlight before he disappeared.
         At the same time, more of the things tried to get into the main room. I turned and ran for the nearest elevator. I got the door to open as the first one got through. I stepped inside the elevator right before it got to the door. It reached in for me, grasping my leg. I kicked it off, while trying to reach the close door button. I managed to press it, but the thing came back in again. This time it got all the way in. I swung Ike’s flashlight like a baseball bat down on the things head and there was a sound like glass breaking in a cardboard box. The thing crumpled to the floor, and I pushed it out just before the doors closed.
         I sat down on the floor, trying to process all that just happened. Then I noticed that there was a call elevator button coming from the fifth floor. I pressed the five buttons on the keyboard and waited as the elevator hummed up to that level. I just hoped to god that those things hadn’t made it up this far yet.
         The elevator made a familiar ringing sound I had heard a hundred times before. I stood up, flashlight at the ready. The doors opened and I almost swung as a woman ran into the elevator. She immediately pressed the close doors button and then the emergency stop. Then she started sobbing and sat on the ground, with her hands covering her face.
         I recognized her almost immediately as Stacey from accounting. I wondered to ask her how she got to the elevator, but instead I sat down next to her and put a hand on her sobbing shoulder. She looked up at me with a face full of fear, and quivering lips. I tried to smile at her, but it was too hard. Instead, I started to pet her hair. Its strange the things you do in a crisis.

         That was two days ago. Stacey and I had made love countless times on the first day. That was before she told me she had been bitten by one of those things. She died a little after that. I thought it was all over, but something strange happened to her. After she died (she kind of choked to death, although I don’t understand how), she laid there for maybe a minute. Then it was as if a shiver ran through her whole body. Her skin started to turn grey, and her eyes black. Then she stood up, making that same guttural clicking sound again. I hesitated just a second before bashing her head in.
         It wasn’t long after that the things found me. They keep pressing on the door to the elevator. Just two hours ago, the door opened just enough for a set of fingers to get through. The worst part was the sound though, the sound they make when they want something. It is kind of a moaning sound, like a lover. It just rises and rises, and then they start screaming.
         Did I mention that Stacey bit me? It was just a little love nibble, but it was enough I guess. That makes it so much better though, I think. I’ll be dead by the time they get to me. I wonder if I will be conscience when I turn into one of them. Will I have all my thoughts and memories? I can’t tell for sure, but I will find out soon enough.
         I only wish I had a gun instead of a flashlight. Some way to put me out of this hell would be welcome. Just pull the trigger and it’s all over. It’s kind of hard to do that with a flashlight though. All that’s left is to wait here, and see which death comes first.