12. FRIDAY 2:25 PM
Miranda has had a tough time getting downstairs. The lobby is in chaos as she reaches it. The main doors to the building are locked. She tries them all – same story. She runs to the dazed reception guard. ‘Is there a way of opening these manually?’ she asks.
The guard is catatonic, motionless. ‘I went to university,’ he tells her.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I have a master’s degree in art history. Just so that I could wind up as a f*cking security guard. A f*cking trained Alsation could do this job. A blind one. With three legs.’
‘The key. I need the door key.’
‘My mother didn’t raise me to stand watch over some rich f*cker’s property.’
‘The key!’ she shouts, slapping his face hard and preparing to duck in case he hits her back. But it seems to do the trick.
‘There’s a single master that overrides all the deadbolts to the outer doors and the atrium.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Out there.’ The guard points through the glass to the foliage-covered annexe.
The white-eyed Swan is just finishing locking the door to the atrium from the inside. He pockets the special deadbolt key and continues to pull June behind him. Although she is now conscious again, he has tied her hands together. He drags her across the forest floor of the atrium. ‘You’ll get what’s coming to you, you painted Jezebel,’ he pants. ‘My God, you could afford to lose some weight.’
Meera is small, but she’s fast. As Clarke swings his bat, she drops to her knees and grabs his raised boot, tipping him off-balance. Clarke is back on his feet in moments. Obsessive men have hidden reserves of power. Roaring like a bear, he slams Meera backward into one of the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass, with tremendous force. The glass holds, but its surround doesn’t. The whole thing starts to crack around the edges. Clarke charges forward, pinning Meera against the glass with his orthopedic boot as the rest of the frame cracks.
Clarke shakes his head piteously. ‘If only you could have learned to wear a dress like the other girls.’ He pushes down hard.
The entire panel divorces itself from the frame and falls out, taking Meera with it.
She falls slowly at first, almost gracefully. Meera plummets through space, sailing down on the glass sheet.
As Swan manhandles June on her stomach across the atrium, June hears a strange noise – shattering glass – and looks up. Swan looks up, too. The sheet of glass carrying Meera explodes through the roof of the atrium. Non-lethal fragments rain down, but the great window pane lands on Swan, shearing him in half at the softest point of his waist, and spraying June in blood.
Meera falls through the roof into the top of a tall, artificial palm tree.
From inside the building, Miranda hammers on the doors. June looks up at her in a daze. ‘June!’ she shouts, ‘June! You have to get the key!’ But June is too stunned to register anything. ‘The key! In his pocket! The key!’
As June gathers her senses, she realises what Miranda is asking of her. She reaches into the still-twitching corpse’s jacket and fishes for the key. As she does so, the top half of Swan convulses violently, making her scream. The half-a-corpse latches onto her, pulling her over and trying to drag itself on top. The ragged stump of Swan’s spinal cord is poking out from the bottom of his rib cage, so June stamps on it. As Swan falls back with a gurgling yell, she grabs the key and makes for the entrance door.
She has trouble finding the lock, but spots it and inserts the key. While she’s trying to twist it, Half-Swan starts clawing at her. Oddly, his lower half appears to have died. It’s only the part with the brain in that she has to worry about now. His right hand is trying to lock itself around her ankle. This is definitely sexual harassment, as defined in the office bible.