Landscapes for the Dead

The Ascent

Smoke was in my eyes and flames were clearly visible, but no sprinkler system was being activated. There was a wailing alarm echoing down the staircase but no water. I had thought there would be water, but that goes to show how much our expectations are warped by movies. It had been five years since I'd seen a movie.

The fire was in the staircase, a few flights above me. It was moving slow, but I could feel the heat from it billowing down to the lower levels. Below me was so far untouched by fire. I raced up the stairs.

Everyone else who was in the building had gotten out already. I'd heard them all thundering down the stairs from inside my room. When I broke free the building was empty, the fire trucks were here. I doubted the firemen would try to save the building if they knew what it really was. Let it burn. Let it be reduced to ash.

I reached the flames, and the heat beat my face. I felt sticky from sweat all over. My ragged clothes clung to me uncomfortably. I pushed on. The walls were alight, but I could guess that most of the heat I was feeling came from behind them. The alarm screeched in my skull.

My bare feet made a soft slapping sound on the stairs as I struggled upwards. There were rough ridges for grip running along the edge of each step that rubbed the balls of my feet raw. The skin on my soles weren't thick because I hadn't run or walked anywhere in a long time. God did I need to run now.

Maybe the fire would stop the thing behind me. I wasn't sure. I never saw the men who locked me here do any experiments with fire to it. I knew they never did experiments with fire on me.

The fire seemed to have stopped at a wall up ahead. I focused on it, counted the steps. It was an outward facing wall which was probably why it was unburnt, but in a few minutes that wouldn't matter. For the moment I rested against it, my muscles quivering. My leg cramped. I gasped and straightened it, clumsily sitting down. It subsided and I tried to control my heavy breathing so I could listen for something. The alarm wasn't helping.

There - was that it? From down below I thought I heard a click-clack. I couldn't rely on my ears though, as I'd been hearing that sound every day since coming here. It would be easy for me to hallucinate it. The sound was always a part of my dreams. It's face was a part of my dreams. The face of my roommate.

Even if I did imagine it, it wouldn't be long before the sound came for real. I knew it would. How long had it waited for me? How long had it eyed me hungrily? And how many times had I blessed the chains that held it away? Now was its chance. I was lucky that my restraints had been damaged in the chaos that came before and was able to escape first. But I saw that its chains were also damaged, not as much as mine were, but eventually - if the thing continued working on them as frantically as it had been when I fled the room - they would snap and it would be here. I scrambled to my feet and bounded up the stairs. I tried taking them two or three at a time, but my toes kept smashing into the edge of the steps and I tripped. It didn't matter. Even when my nose broke and dripped blood into my mouth and my upper lip felt sawn halfway through from my teeth I did not slow. I could not be caught.

A crash from below. Oh god. I had to get off these stairs. There was a door to the right, labelled LVL 9. I wrenched it open and a fist of hot air blasted out into my face. Foul brown-grey smoke poured over the lintel and collected under the stairs above me. I held my arm up to shield my thin eyelids and rushed in.

It was a floor of office cubicles. A manager's office with large glass windows looking into the main area was nestled in a corner. Most of these windows were cracked. Papers and files and the chipboard desks where all on fire, sending black fragments of ash swirling into the air. The carpet had melted. The fumes were overwhelming. I dropped to the floor and crawled towards the edge of the floor, where there were floor to ceiling length windows overlooking the city. I hadn't seen outside for five years. I could picture it: the massive high rises spearing up to the sky, all perfectly parallel with each other and scattered with lit windows. I couldn't see any of that because the room was filling with smoke and the air was hazy from heat.

My elbows burned and the carpet made its print in them. It was a synthetic carpet, and the fire had turned it sticky and stringy. It clung to my toes and my palms, and melted into the material of the knees of my pants.

My hands were blistering by the time I reached the windows at the edge. The back of my neck felt sunburnt. Tears had washed lines in the soot down my cheeks, and the fire was stealing them away. I lifted a shaking hand and feebly tapped at the glass. Maybe I hoped it would break. Maybe I hoped someone below would see me up here.

I definitely heard it that time. The click-clack. Up here the sounds were the fire crackling and popping and the whoosh as the heat played tricks with convection - and still that thrumming alarm - but I definitely heard it. It was on its way.

I stood up and my head was engulfed in the smoke. I pressed up against the glass and looked down. There were the men, the ones who entered my room in suits which they changed for lab coats. They would take me if I made it to the ground alive; my roommate would get me if I cowered up here. The men who were sometimes in suits sometimes in lab coats wanted my body to put through tests, my roommate wanted more, I feared. It wanted more than just my flesh.

I looked down at everyone gathered below - the firemen, the police, the others who escaped this building - but remained indecisive. They hadn't yet seen the figure up on the ninth floor pressed against the window.

Something on the stairs, coming closer. The sound that infested my nightmares grew louder. I looked about in a frenzy. I crashed into burning tables and knocked over semi-melted chairs. The plastic ones would do me no good, being soft from the fire. I had finally decided. I needed something solid.

My shin struck something which seared through my pants and branded my skin. A chair, but not one of the plastic rolling desk chairs: an uncomfortable metal chair most likely for visitors to sit in. The cushioned seat was burning, but that didn't matter. I grabbed it and battled my way back to the window. The skin of my palms screamed but I ignored it. The last action my hands would do was breaking this window.

I heaved the chair at the glass. It shattered on the first strike. Maybe it had been ready to bust for a while now, and only needed a little push.

I toppled forwards, loosing my balance after swinging the chair. All the air in the room wanted to rush out the new hole made in the window and I was dragged along with it. I floated down through the night air, accompanied by twirling fragments of glass. The orange glow in the windows receded into the distance above me. A whole five floors were on fire, five glimmering orange strips encircling the building. Let the whole thing burn, every single floor. Let my roommate burn.

I wondered with a little fear that maybe the firemen would have one of those inflated landing cushions and I would land safely and the men in suits and lab coats would capture me again. I rotated in the air, and saw there was nothing below except a ring of upturned faces around the area of concrete footpath that I would strike. That was good. The footpath was coming closer with alarming rapidity, but before it did I remembered to turn up my face and look at the city one last time.

I was glad to be outside.