Trapped

FIFTEEN

At some point she stopped crying and just lay there numb, sprawled out recumbent in the corner of the elevator, Renni's cries still echoing in her head.

She stared without seeing as the elevator stopped on each floor, all the buttons she had hit during the attack. The doors would open, close, and then the car would move up to the next floor. A rhythmic whoosh, close, whoosh, close.

Finally it stopped.

It was the absence of the lulling noise that woke her out of it. Her eyes flicked briefly around the car, rested on the floor indicator. She had reached the top: 65.

The lit-up buttons all went dark. The doors closed.

The elevator began to descend. 64...63...62...61...

She had to get up, had to stop it. Marianne lurched forward with some effort, hit 60, too late, hit several frantically...

59...58...

She stood up and the doors spilled open onto the fifty-eighth floor lobby.

Marianne stepped out heavily.

She stood there until she heard the doors close behind her. Then she turned around, wondering if she did the right thing. She heard the elevator continue its descent.

When she walked, she did so as if she was in a trance, dream-like.

This was a nightmare. Just a nightmare she was bound to wake up from at any minute. She would tell Renni about it in the morning.

She moved slowly across the lobby and opened a door. The cold hit her fast. She walked into the expansive unfinished dual suite of apartments where she had been only some hours ago. Playing the real estate agent.

You got off on the fifty-eighth floor with some gentleman this morning.

Mr. Manley.

The penthouse.

She would have to get to him. He could help her.

Her steps felt at once light and heavy. For she felt nothing in her movements, yet it took strength to walk. Her head throbbed. She could feel her pulse in her bloody cheek.

She pressed on.

Darkness.

The muted city lights were all that illuminated the unfinished floor. The Chicago night filtered through the bare windows, plastic sheeting flapping violently in the wind.

Marianne could make out the dark piles of construction material. Drywall, lumber, bundles of plastic.

Everywhere there were shadows and hidden spaces.

She stepped through the skeletal framing of a future wall into another room. She stopped.

She heard something.

A ticking.

And ahead of her...

A light. A red light.

A large stack of lumber at the far end of the room seemed to glow red, a light source somewhere behind it.

Marianne scanned the room, the only noise above the ticking being the continuously flapping plastic, the tape coming loose at the corners of the sheeting.

She stepped slowly around the pile of lumber.

On the floor sat a portable space heater. The electric coils glowed, a deep red.