Escape

Written by Shanna Pauline Bernier

She stood next to the clock and stared at its unmoving hands. It had been working moments before; now it was motionless. Something about the stillness in the room was very relaxing.  All she could hear was the sound of her own beating heart. She looked very serene, her shoulder-length hair set as nicely as the other housewives from her neighbourhood, polished and prim in a green dress one might wear to church. All around the room lay the bodies of the fallen soldiers – those whom she thought of as soldiers, whom one might have described as agents, guards, or minions. They were all still, unmoving, as though frozen. Their destroyed weapons lay beside them in a heap: it was a strange, bloodless scene with only a few visible scrapes on the men. It looked as though they had all died of broken hearts.

The woman looked up from the clock face and out the window. They were high up, perhaps on the 15th floor. Some had made the mistake of trying to take the elevator to escape.  That scene would not have been bloodless. The woman might have felt remorse, but she also felt that other people’s fear had led to this, that it was not something she needed to feel guilty about. She gazed out the window and remarked to herself that the buildings around her were starting to reboot. Lights flickered above her and the silence was broken only by the sound of an alarm beeping in the distance. She could have been in any building, but she had chosen this one. She walked out of the space full of fallen men and into an office unfamiliar to her, but the same as any other office. The woman stepped into the space and saw a desk, a phone, a computer, a standing lamp, a swivel chair... None of this was her world, but it all felt right.

She glanced at the bookshelf, admiring the broad selection of 19th century literature, then stepped towards the desk and touched the phone. A shot of powerful electricity pulsed through her veins: her mind was filled with conversation, numbers, codes, information and power. The woman withdrew her hand, stepped back out of the office and glanced up to find the sputtering emergency exit sign. She began descending the stairs.

Somewhere around the 3rd floor she heard people coming up and went through the door into a deserted accounting firm. Computers and printers began to buzz and squeak as she walked past them, errors flashing on every monitor. She looked into one of the offices and saw a large TV with a blue screen displaying the word “help.” Well-manicured fingers reached out and felt the raised hairs of static electricity between her and the display.  Had she been at home sitting in front of a screen like this only yesterday?  Had she mindlessly watched the news while she cooked supper and counted the killers she saw as almost imaginary? Today she was different. Today the woman was alive.  Voices began to draw near again, and as the TV turned black she ran down the shadowed hallway towards the emergency stairs and a new beginning.