Heroes

Chapter 49: inside the Beast tower

Foolish POV.

I let out a tired yawn as I continued to finish typing up a report that was due in a few days from the twelfth floor cafeteria. It was empty at this time of night. Almost 9pm on a Friday, everyone liked to leave early to see their family, or go out for drinks with friends. I however had to finish a report and there was better wifi here then there was at home.

This was the easiest time for me to focus, we got free food offered up until 7pm and so I’d get something to eat and spend the evenings in the cafeteria listening to music or a movie while I finished filling out my report. Because of my position I was used to staying late, as head of the medical field I had to stay in case something happened.

Over the weekend, and whenever there was nobody at the lab I had to hang around for an extra half hour while we waited for recently developed items to safely freeze, to keep the medicines from having any reactions while nobody was around.

I spent most of my time living here though, in one of the many small apartments of the Beast tower. The biggest apartment had enough room for a family of four to live in, and the bosses and executives were all kind enough to allow people to have their families stay there. But I lived there on my own, only leaving over the weekends so I could stay with my boyfriends.

Finally I finished my report and emailed it to the supervisors who had to look over it, before I shut down my laptop. I stood up and walked out of the cafeteria, knowing that the incredibly powerful sensors would turn off all the lights and shut the blinds of the windows when they didn’t see any movement.

At this time of night the only people who were around were the janitors, maintenance techs, and security guards, and I'd occasionally stop to chat to them about how they are doing, but today I couldn’t help but notice how quiet it was.

Whenever I left at 9pm there’d be one guy cleaning the floors in the hallway right outside the cafeteria. Another guy would be washing the windows. A third and fourth would be making sure all of the products that needed to be shipped to different parts of the country would be hanging around a larger elevator used for transporting food or clothes to the loading docks.

However, nobody was around. My eyes narrowed but I ignored it, the night staff were all quite friendly with each other, so they might have all been off for a wedding, or a birthday, but that didn’t explain the lack of security guards. My next idea was that there was a fire drill or something on one of the other floors and the building, but that didn’t make sense either.

So I decided to call some of my friends to see if they had heard anything.  After all, if there was an order to evacuate the building for some reason it got sent to all of the staff, telling them not to turn up to work, or just explaining the situation.

First I decided to call my friend Karl, he was the more likely of my friends here to know what was going on. After all he worked up in finances and promotion alongside a lot of the executives and CEOs and were friends with most of them. So I pulled out my phone and went to contacts before calling him.

After a couple of rings he answered, sounding cautious. “Hello? Foolish?” He asked quietly after he answered.
“Yeah, it’s me. Sorry for calling you so late. I hope I didn’t wake you,” I responded, keeping at the same volume as the brunette on the other phone. Karl didn’t respond and so I continued.

“So I was just wondering if there was some kind of fire or something that I didn’t know of. I haven’t gotten an email to steer clear of the building, but the place is deserted,” I explained. “I figured that if anyone would know anything it would be you and so I was-”

Karl raised his voice as he responded. “What do you mean the place is deserted?” He asked loudly, and it almost sounded like a hiss.
“I mean what I’m saying.” I replied. “I was working late in the cafeteria, so I could snack while I did, and when I walked out the place was a ghost town.”

Karl muttered a swear word before I heard the sound of rustling on the other end of the line. “Stay where you are,” he instructed firmly before correcting himself. “Actually, lock yourself in the lab where you work, or in a cleaning cupboard or something. Don’t move, don't talk, just keep the door shut and I’ll call you when I’m there.”

“But Karl, I don’t understand what’s going-” the phone cut off, and I was annoyed that he’d hung up on me without giving me an explanation. I did as he said though, since I knew him quite well and trusted him completely. I turned towards the nearest door and attempted to open it… but it didn’t budge.

This confused and worried me more. The doors were only able to be locked and unlocked by the guards, they had electronic locks so that if there was a security breach, an intruder for example, all of the rooms could be locked down at once. But they weren’t locked for the night until all of the cleaning had been done, which usually went until midnight.

I tried all of the handles nearby, but none of them worked. I debated whether I should call Karl back, tell him that the doors were locked and ask him what he thought I should do, however I decided against it.

Instead I decided to head down towards the levels where the apartments were, since my other friend, a guy called Eret, lived on site 24/7, unless he went out to a club on the weekend. He worked on a floor which was mainly for packaging non-edible supplies. Clothes (both second and first hand), toys (for little kids), blankets, and other things.

So I ran into the stairway, there was an elevator on this floor but I was feeling too worried about going on it after hearing Karl’s ominous warning. My friend Eret stayed in a nice apartment here, and I sprinted down several flights of stairs to try and get to the floor where the staff housing was.

After running a few floors I got puffed and decided to slow down to a fast walk. I had reached the seventh floor, and Eret’s apartment was on the third floor. I could in theory run to the exit, but I felt like it wouldn’t be safe to run all the way down. I wasn’t sure why but I felt like Karl seemed too freaked out for it to be fake.

However suddenly I heard footsteps running up the stairs, making me freeze as the sounds got closer by the second. I knew that running into them seemed like a bad idea and ran back up a floor onto the eighth floor before sprinting down the hallway.

The lights were all off, which surprised me, since the lights were always on when the sensors picked up movement. But if they couldn’t see any light that would mean they wouldn’t look for me and so I wasn’t complaining.

I hid around the corner of a hallway, and grabbed my phone out of my pocket to call the police or anything (it helped since one of my boyfriends was a police officer). However when I attempted to call anyone it said that it was unavailable, which didn’t make any sense.

After trying to call several different people; the police, my boyfriends, my parents, Eret, and my boss, I was getting frustrated. Suddenly an alarm sounded coming out of my phone and I swore, immediately throwing it down to start running, but that’s when I heard the sound of something being fired.

Something sharp hit me in the shoulder and I found myself continuing to stumble forward and look for a room I could hide in before collapsing in the middle of the hallway as I passed out.
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