And before I could say anything else, I felt the urge to vomit up my insides. I ran to one of the stalls—I’d just killed a man with a pen and was rewarded by the cosmic removal of a death tally—and started throwing up whatever the hell my late lunch had been on whatever day of the week this was again, while Blair held my hair back.

  I flushed it. I stayed low, recoiling, recovering, questioning.

  “Do you feel okay?” she asked. I nodded, barely. Ahead of me, I caught the faint sight of something sticking out from behind the toilet—something taped on that would’ve only been visible from my strange, unenviable vantage point.

  I reached around and tried to grab it. “What are you—” she started, before I tore off the tape and dislodged the object.

  It was a gun. With it, a note attached.

  I read it aloud:

  “Remember—this is overdue. They drove you to this point. They ignored you. Belittled you. Made you feel small. Invisible. NO MORE. It’s time to stand up for yourself. No more thinking. Just acting now.”

  I wore a horrid expression.

  “Uhm, what the fuck is that?” she asked.

  “Sounds like it’s a hype-up note for a murder spree?”

  “Does this have anything to do with all the other psychotic shit that’s—”

  “No, I think we legitimately work with a psychopath who was planning to shoot up the office.”

  And then, a hint of a crack came to her voice. “Your tally went down.”

  “I know, I—” We’d moved a few steps away from the stall now. I looked at the weak, makeshift barrier we’d built to protect ourselves from chaos. “Yeah. It’s fucking legit.”

  “So what the fuck do we do?” she asked.

  I thought about it. “I guess we have two options. First: we wait it out in here, until the timer runs out. Die in the men’s room.”

  “I gotta say, I think that’s the one, Jess.”

  “Option two: We head into whatever clusterfuck is outside, and… participate in the murderfest. Hope we don’t get our faces ripped off.”

  “God, they both sound so good.”

  And then, silence between us. She was looking at me a certain way. “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing. I was just kind of hoping you’d do a harder sell for Option 2? I dunno, maybe a version of it where we go after the shittiest people that work here, or something?”

  “I mean, that sounds pretty freaking demented, but hey I guess that’s your prerogative? I’m not the moral arbiter of—”

  “I’m so glad you were able to sneak your thesaurus into the bathroom.” Off my annoyed look—“What? Kidding. I don’t know, I don’t want to fucking die.”

  “Well yeah, no shit, I don’t want to either.”

  She thought about it. “Look, I’m not usually religious, or even spiritual for that matter—”

  “You believe in astrology.”

  “It’s a distant cousin to science. My point being, have we considered that, maybe, it’s, I don’t know, a… gift… from some sort of benevolent force, or creator, that we found this… gun… during such a pivotal and challenging time in our lives?”

  I paused for a beat.

  “Do you hear yourself right now?” I asked.

  “Yes, and hearing it out loud I realize it sounds fucking insane. I don’t know! We were trying to escape earlier, why don’t we just go back to that?!”

  I pointed at her. “I can work with that.”

  “And if, fucking, the tallies don’t disappear, we can re-assess.”

  “Re-assess,” I said. A new mantra. I was down with it. I looked at my phone. 4:46 PM. We had exactly thirty minutes left. “So,” I said, “we’ll escape quickly. And maybe, by some insane miracle, that’ll be enough.”

  “Maybe that’s enough,” she echoed.

  I approached the exit, steadied the mop handle, and pressed my ear to the door to listen. I was immediately met by the sounds of shouts, screams, guttural screams, and steps pounding down the halls. Blair got all the news she needed from my wavering face.

  “We’ll wait until it quiets down a bit,” I said. She nodded. More chaos, more yelling, running, then—

  Stillness. Stillness.

  I pulled the mop out of its place. “Go, follow my lead.”

  I swung the door open. We stepped into what felt like a completely new world—one marked by frenzy. Things cluttered, blood marks, torn articles of clothing, and soon—the odd, injured body crawling down the hallway. And for just a split second, you’d think—there’s my chance. There’s my easy pickings. And then you’d mentally slap yourself and keep stepping, watching groups run by, some of them stopping to consider approaching you before noticing the gun in your hand.

  We reached the end of the hall. The emergency stairwell.

  I pulled at the door. Then I pulled again.

  There was no give. It wasn’t opening.

  “Is it locked?” Blair asked.

  “Just keep cover,” I said. “And let me know if anyone’s coming.” I tugged harder. “Fucking come on!” I smashed at the thin rectangular window on the door with my gun. After a few hits, it caved. I pushed my hand through, trying to be careful not to cut myself open in a big way, and awkwardly reached the handle from the other side. Still no luck.

  “Why the fuck won’t it open?” I growled.

  I felt a pull on my shoulder. “Jess, I—”

  I turned. “What?”

  She motioned to the thin walkway adjacent to us. Further down it, a tall, lumbering man was backing away—his arm wrapped around a woman’s neck, dragging her with him as she struggled to break from his grasp.

  I hid the gun and made my way towards him.

  Immediately, he spoke up. “Don’t come closer!” he shouted, taking one step, two steps backwards. “This isn’t your business!”

  I continued forward. “Let her go.”

  The woman attempted to make use of the distraction, but he maintained his grip. “You heard what the voice said. This is what we have to do.” I revealed the pistol. “Oh great, terrific,” he said. “So what, you just gonna kill us both?”

  “Neither. If you drop her now.”

  “You’re just trying to steal my easy kill. Trying to save your bullets for when you really need them.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  I aimed at his head. Some people couldn’t be reasoned with. His panicked eyes shifted.

  “I—” he said but his sentence was interrupted by my—

  Click.

  What?

  A second’s delay as gravity resettled, then he started laughing. I checked the gun’s safety—off. I pointed again. Click. Why wasn’t it—

  “Great, that’s awesome,” he said. “Cheers. And now that I know where you stand with me, it’s gonna be a whole lot easier for me to kill you next.”

  I continued looking at the revolver, full-blown panicking now. “Blair, do you—” but I checked behind me and before I could even get a second opinion, I realized she was gone.

  “Blair?!” I shouted, before returning to the man who, despite the distance, I could now tell had a different demeanor—a glint in his eyes that more than meant he was ready to snap a neck to remove a tally.

  And as I steadied myself for the inevitable horrible sight—-

  “AHHHHH!!!” came the battle cry from a familiar voice from the far end of the hall, as a figure appeared around the corner behind the heavyset villain, reached up to his neck, and slashed across it with a glimmering object I couldn’t make out.

  A slit throat. A choppily, somewhat unevenly slit throat. For the second time in my life, and the second time today, I saw an object to a throat mean death, and soon poured out from him the red waterfall, and the woman—if she wasn’t already dead—fell to the floor. I rushed over, spotting the blade from a snapped pair of scissors in Blair’s hand, and the tally on her arm slowly go from

  III to II

  And it wasn’t just me now, out of our duo, who had proven they were capable of murder. We both were. Heck, probably everyone was, I was now realizing.

  And then Blair fell to the floor too, on all fours, hyperventilating. “That was fucked up,” she said between rapid breaths, “that was so fucked up, ew ew ew fuck fuck fuck, what the fuck—” she looked back at the man collapsed in his own life force, “I’m gonna puke, I’m gonna fucking—” she started gagging, “so fucked up. So fucked up.”

  At least she doesn’t have a stomach for it, I thought. I tended to the lady who looked like she was ankle-deep in the afterlife. She was stealing breath back from the world now. Slowly, I helped her go from on her knees to on her feet. “Thank you,” she said, barely there. Then as reality seemed to register for her more clearly, she repeated it. “Thank you.”

  Then she looked down at my arm—my tally—as if remembering what was happening. Then, down at my gun, and then her eyes changed. Suddenly, she was fighting for it.

  “What the fuck?!” I said as she tried to force me down.

  “Give it to me.”

  “It doesn’t even fucking work!”

  But it didn’t matter. She was one-track.

  And just as soon as she’d started her new movement, it was interrupted by a swift boot to the ribs. She collapsed again in pain. Blair reared back for another kick. “Fucking stop,” Blair said, before delivering it anyways. Then, she turned to me. “I’m so fucking done with this.”

  I popped the gun open. “No bullets,” I said.

  She shrugged. “Fuck it. We can still use it to scare people.” Then—“So, what now?”

  “Other stairwell,” I said. “There’s no other way out—”

  “What about the—” and as if telepathically, our eyes shifted way down the hall to where the elevators were, where the gangfight of folks in business casual was taking place both in and outside the open steel doors. She recalibrated. “The other stairwell, that’s through the—”

  “Main office floor,” I said.

  “Are we really going to subject ourselves to that smoke?”

  I hesitated. “Yes.”

  And it was only thirty seconds after that we were huddled around the corner to the open office area, doing our best impression of the man who first attacked us.

  I tried to sneak faint glances into the hall. It was hard to see what was going on, but hear?

  That part was vivid, via the thuds, shattered shrieks, grunts, crackling, and a fucking intermittent voice on megaphone painting a pretty vivid picture.

  And for just a moment, my superpower of depersonalization was fading. The sequence of ‘violent office politics’ I’d been subject to thus far had put me squarely inside my own body. My mind wasn’t off wandering in some faraway forest. It was here. In my skull. Afraid. And my counterpart could sense it.

  “I’ll lead,” Blair said, with what felt like a bit of forced confidence. “We’ll rush to the nearest pod, crawl under the table, and move in small bursts, table to table. Let’s try to stick to the outer edge, and go under desks that are closer to the wall. And if we get spotted—” she looked down at the gun, “we point first.” Then back up. “That doesn’t work? We fucking run.” A tense look now. “A crouched speedwalk into a fast crawl, and, 3, and 2, and 1, and—”

  We pushed ahead as the motion picture came into view. We kept a stiff pace. The new scenery quickly flooded my eyes—a pile of dead bodies haphazardly strewn in the middle of the hall, groups gathered in corners—and then it was gone and I was underneath the first desk pod with Blair. I gripped the gun tightly. A pointless gesture, really. A beat, and then—

  “You saw something fucked up,” she whispered, either asking or telling me.

  “Yes, I most certainly did,” I said. “You weren’t looking?”

  “Tried my best not to. Didn’t think it would help!”

  “Smart,” I said. “Guess I’ll keep biting that bullet for both of us.” I was closer to the edge, so I took a peek around the corner while Blair stayed locked on the hallway we’d just emerged from.

  My glimpse revealed—-

  Groups of mismatched sizes fleeing from—or closing in on—each other. Stragglers either cowering or swinging makeshift weapons. The gravely injured being prowled on by folks that seemed less like humans and more like vultures.

  And then my ocular lens returned back to behind the table. “Well shit,” I said. I stole a look at the next pod—looked like an eight second speedy crawl away. But when?

  “People,” I heard an amplified voice come from somewhere. “We don’t actually know if we’ll die if we don’t fulfill the tallies!” I snuck another glance. People were distracted by the voice. An opening.

  “Now,” I stressed, and on we shuffled along. Each inch and movement forward brought a new quick flash as I looked around—people shuffling in paranoid fashion, a desk station on fire, groups with heads lifted at something or someone.

  “And on the off chance that the tallies really do mean death, then—so what?” The megaphone man’s voice continued and meanwhile our arrival at the next table was greeted by the sight of a dead body sprawled out in front of us. After a second of thought, I pulled the body closer to help obscure Blair and I in our new hiding spot. We watched as two men went at each other like gladiators in a nearby corridor. We couldn’t stay here too long. “Do you want, what are likely your last moments, to be marred by a complete uprooting of any good you’ve done?”

  I edged to the corner under the table and poked out for another look—I finally clocked the man with the megaphone. Oh shit, it was Chris! He was our Fire Warden for the third floor—I think he worked in design? He’d scaled an almost impossibly high shelf to say his piece. For some, he remained a spectacle, while others tuned out his blaring voice and continued to run roughshod on their peers. A few others even started scaling the large structure he’d perched himself atop of, which prompted Chris to start dropping some rather heavy-looking objects on them. “Hey!” He screamed again. “Don’t even think about it, you fucks!”.

  I continued surveying for our next opening. I spotted an almost nonsensically large crew of product folks, sleeves rolled up, closing in on a smaller group. One of the people on the ‘outnumbered’ side, chair held out in front for defense, went for a desperate gamble:

  “There aren’t enough people left to kill for all of you to survive!” she screamed.

  Blair and I turned to each other. It wasn’t a perfect diversion but it was the best we had. We took off in a sprint-crawl to the next table—a much bigger chasm than the ones before with just how much open space stretched across the floor.

  “Great attempt at trying to split us up—” came a voice from the larger group.

  “Some of your tallies have five,” responded another from the defending group, “you’d have to go well beyond this floor, and with what little time you have left—”

  “Listen, your tactic’s not going to work,” the aggressor said again, confidently, unaware that his peers in the oversized product team were already nervously starting to break apart.

  And as we continued on, trying to make ourselves as small as possible, Chris’s voice added to the chaos as he looped back to the beginning of his message: “People, we don’t actually know if we’ll die if we don’t fulfill—”

  Past scattered chairs, past lifeless bodies, and soon the table we were trying to reach was just ahead. We hauled forward in tight jabs of movement, closing in, and as Blair in front of me jagged past a particular dead body, I realized pretty quickly that perhaps dead wasn’t all that accurate as I came across and saw a limp, seemingly lifeless hand outstretch and grab my—

  Arm. It pulled me down and the person flipped over, revealing a knife in their other hand, already reared. Blair, survival tunnel vision and all, hadn’t even noticed I was no longer behind her. I caught the hand holding the knife as it descended, twisted it and heard a crack. The knife dropped. I grabbed it. I looked at the stranger—weak, lifeless, their pitiful attempt more akin to a death throe than a meaningful movement—hesitated, then plunged the knife right into their chest.

  And then, I just sat there, in disbelief. The reality of the threshold I’d crossed—the first not wholly necessary murder—hit me. And then sound and vision came back and I panicked, looked in every direction around me hoping the lapse hadn’t brought attention—no eyeballs, it seemed, a miracle—then scurried to the next table where Blair was already desperately peeking out.

  I joined her under cover. Panting. Panting hard.

  “What happened? You were just, sort of frozen—”

  “Someone tried to grab me,” I whispered. I looked down at my arm.

  II

  “And then what?” she asked. “Did anyone see you? Are you okay?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “And I don’t think so.”

  And I tuned into Chris’s repeating, distorted message again. “Do you want, what are likely your last moments, to be marred by a complete uprooting of any good you’ve done?”

  And as Blair seemingly took the reigns of being the commander and lens for our final sprint, I tried to sit with that pointed, subtextless message and reconcile with the reality that I’d just now broached something completely inconsistent with me, the me I thought I was, though said reconciliation wasn’t completely hitting as I also had to come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t a trick of the light, and that indeed Lindsey, marketing lead, frequent all-hands presenter and group leader of our social committee was absolutely bent over looking at us with a smile on her face and blood dropping from her mouth.

  “You two,” she said, “It’s so good to see you here, right now.”