Company - Max Barry [111]
“No, I mean there are hundreds of them,” Blake says to the phone. “Literally hundreds, do you understand?”
Eve looks at Jones. “They're going to get in here.”
“I know.”
She takes his hand. “You have to stop them. Please. Jones.”
“How the hell do you think I can do that?”
“Please.” Her body trembles. “Jones, please, they're going to hurt us.”
Jones says nothing.
She cries harder. “Jones, please don't let them touch me.”
Level 13 is not marked as such, of course. The door says MAINTENANCE. But it's after 12 and before 14, and if you're looking for it, it's not hard to spot. A man with his shirtsleeves rolled up over bulging biceps—perhaps until recently a frequent user of the Zephyr gym—is the first to reach it. He tries the handle, but it's locked. He slaps his hand against the door in frustration. From the other side, there is a startled yelp. The man turns and yells down the stairwell. “They're in here!”
Blake paces back and forth across the carpet. When he smooths back his hair, his hand trembles. Abruptly he grabs at his eye patch, pulls it off, and tosses it onto the carpet. The skin around his eye is gray and shiny. Something—or someone—crashes against the stairwell door, and Blake jumps. “We need some kind of barricade,” he says, his voice tight. “Something to . . .” He turns. “Jones. Jones. What's your plan?”
Jones looks up. “What?”
“Your plan. Come on. Yes, okay, you got us. Alpha is over. Congratulations. Now how are you getting out of this? You wouldn't have done this unless you had a way out for yourself.”
Jones feels sympathy for him. Not a lot, but some. “Sorry.”
Blake stares. Then he laughs. It comes out high and cracked, and breaks off when there's another crash from the stairwell door.
Eve curls into a ball on the carpet. Jones thinks about suggesting that she move. It wouldn't be a good idea for her to be here, under the bank of monitors, when the horde bursts in. That would make a bad situation worse.
He strokes her hair. “I don't think Zephyr is externalizing anymore,” he murmurs, as the stairwell lock splinters and the door bangs open.
He hears Mona scream. And somebody else—male or female, Jones can't tell—lets out a high, strangled shriek that he will never forget. “We're just businesspeople! We're just businesspeople!”
Elizabeth walks to the corridor and presses for an elevator. She turns back to Staff Services, for one last look to remember it by—but there's nothing to look at. The people she worked with are already gone, seeking vengeance, and the interior decoration is nothing special. It's not even level 14, which at least had a distinctive feature in the Berlin Partition. There is nothing significant here for Elizabeth to remember.
Maybe that's why she feels good about leaving. When the elevator arrives, she enters it with a spring in her step. The farther it descends, the higher her mood lifts. Good riddance! she thinks. She feels like laughing.
She used to fall in love with her customers. What kind of person does that? Elizabeth wouldn't describe what she feels toward her embryo as love, not yet, but she knows that feeling is growing. By comparison, her workplace infatuations are—well, there is no comparison, is there? When she thinks about the person she was four months ago, she doesn't even know who that was.
She wonders what she will miss about Zephyr Holdings. This place has dominated her life for most of the last decade. It has largely defined her. But sifting through her memories, the one that stands out is the time she sat in a bathroom stall and realized she was pregnant. So, as the elevator doors slide open onto the parking lot and the ramp and the sunshine beyond, she decides the answer is: Not much.
APRIL
THEY CLAP LOUDLY, passionately, and for far too long: they keep going even when the lights come up. It's a large room filled to capacity, so the applause rolls around like thunder. Jones, who knows he's not a rock star, feels embarrassed. He steps away from the