Bite

Looking Down on the World

We entered a room, a wide, spacious conference room, perhaps thirty or forty feet square. There was a wide window across one side, looking out over the cityscape, and blinds pulled to the sides. There was a single table, long, and surrounded by about twenty rolling chairs. A small door through the right led into a tiny employee kitchen and break-room, and through the left, a door led into a locker room with bathrooms.

"This is why I wanted this particular set of rooms," Rayford said. "I think I can make runs down to the shelter, for canned goods, but the rooms down there have just too many exits to be safe for staying in. But this—however—this is where I had all my conferences..."

"What do you do?" Helen asked.

"Used to be vice company president. Big computer monitor corporation—but we weren't advertising like we should. Our only rivals were those 6K cameras they used for the Hobbit movies, basically, with the high frame rates per second. Except our monitors aren't for movie franchises, it's for gaming. Basically, only geeks seemed to know we exist, we had superior capabilities. On one of our computers, Call of Duty looked like Saving Private Ryan instead of a 1989 PacMan."

He could have been speaking another language for all we knew, although Davey was nodding appreciatively.

Rayford shrugged, and made a waving gesture. It was all in the past. "I was VP, but I took it as my personal goal to be a chameleon throughout the marketing departments... and get popular culture to recognize us, not just gamer and geek culture... we'd just gotten our first celebrity signed up to do our commercials. We were all set to premiere at SDCC with Hank Green and Will Wheaton."

Hailey yawned.

"I know," Rayford said, tiredly, "Doesn't seem to matter now, does it? Anyway, there are two other exits... I've blocked the ones temporarily in the locker room and the kitchen. But here is an idea," he gestured to Wayne and Pedro. "You two can help me—we'll take these dry erase boards off the wall and use the toolkit under the sink—and we'll, you know, drill them onto the doors. Fortify the place. Install locks, that sort of thing. We can raid the place for anything... there's a home goods company office on the third floor, and while it's mostly administrative, they do bring in some of the supplies for rechecking when there is a complaint..."

I tuned him out. I was so tired. I walked slowly across the room, and looked out the window.

The whole world below had gone to shit.