Shadow in Glass

Prologue 1

A moment before the walls started to crumble, an enormous explosion shook the entire building. For just a heartbeat, everything went dead still. The screaming began in earnest when the ceiling panel fell on top of Brian.

The plaster began peeling off the walls in huge chunks. The steel beams of the infrastructure started to scream with the employees. The floor started to buckle a moment later, throwing everyone and everything around as though they were toys. One by one, the windows at the end of the office exploded from the pressure of the twisting building.

Too frightened to scream, Marie managed to crawl over to Carrie's desk. Carrie saw her friend's head had been gouged badly by a falling object.

"What the hell is going on?" Marie demanded, her voice frightened and trembling.

"The building is collapsing," Carrie managed to choke out.

"Are we going to die?" Marie started to cry.

"I don't know," Carrie admitted, guiding her friend through the twisting wreckage. "I think we're fairly safe out here by the windows now that they're gone." She spotted Brian, who was still quite aware and relatively undamaged, and yelled for him across the noise. Brian spotted them and managed to get across the office.

"Push these desks together, and we can hide underneath," Carrie said when he reached them.

"What will that do?" Marie asked.

"It'll give us a chance," Brian answered.

Marie nodded wordlessly and the three of them began to shove the furniture around. They were shortly joined by a dozen other people in the office scrambling over the mess. They had several groups of desks together in short order, creating little islands to hide under. The building began to settle down a bit from its heaving. Brian, Marie, Carrie, and Bart all crawled under their group of desks.

"How did you think of this?" Marie asked.

"I read an extreme survival guide once," Carrie shrugged.

Everything heaved again, and there were renewed cries that died when they realized it was only the building settling into its new precarious position.

"How do you stay so calm?" Marie asked, after calming down from her last screaming jag.

"I'm too shocked to react," Carrie reasoned. "If we survive I'll probably collapse in a fit sometime tomorrow."

"Think it was a bomb?" Bart asked.

"Sounded like it," Brian answered. "Buildings don't usually collapse so spectacularly. Even if they're built on the rubble of another building." He leaned over to Marie, and gently brushed the hair out of the gash on her forehead. "My, that's lovely. That could be a real problem."

"It's just a little cut." Marie moved his hand away.

"No, it's not," Bart agreed as he managed to rip the sleeve off his shirt. He offered it to Brian, who tied it around her head tight enough to staunch the bleeding.

Marie touched the sleeve. "So, what do we do?"

"We wait," Brian answered, "unless we smell gas, fire, or trouble."

Carrie barked a laugh. "Trouble? We're sitting in a building that could collapse completely at any second, and you don't think we're in trouble?"

Before Brian or Bart could answer, there was a deep basso rumble beneath them. The floors and walls began to vibrate, and whatever was left attached to the beams of the structure seemed to leap off and rain down on them. The screaming of the beams began again, and this time they knew there wasn't going to be a way out.

The building lurched violently, sending the desks flying toward the window, exposing Carrie, Marie and Brian to the chaos around them. The three of them clawed desperately at the rubble, trying to get back under the relative safety of the desks. Marie managed to get under another set of desks, as Brian grabbed Carrie's hand to haul her under another desk.

Carrie looked up, and saw a huge chunk of concrete getting ready to release from its precarious hold. "Brian!" she screamed, flinging his hand from her arm. The motion sent him tumbling backward into the rubble, and he landed on his back in perfect view of the block as it fell.

Brian was the only one who saw a strange, serene smile spread across Carrie's face as the block came down directly on top of her. She was looking straight at it when it hit her. Carrie didn't scream.