He watched it, yellow gloves resting on the mop handle. There had once been enough janitors to keep Rock Bottom clean. Now there was Rufus, and apparently every bulb in the Hollow had chosen today to discover that fact.

“Hey, buddy.”

Jack Kennedy approached in his grey suit, carrying the confidence of someone who had found the right person to give a problem to.

“My phone’s dead. Could you take a look? We’re a team. You’re number one. Cornwell appreciates you.”

Rufus looked at his mop.

A few minutes earlier, Jack’s boss had called to ask how many people he intended to fire. Quarter end was approaching; there were quotas. Jack had promised recommendations by Friday, then, into an ominous silence, by the end of the day. When he realised the connection had failed, he sent an email confirming Friday.

Now it was lunchtime. He left the phone problem in capable hands.

Rufus wiped the handset thoroughly. It was the only part of the assignment he understood.

In her laboratory, Talisa Monroe was negotiating with an escaped rat. Swiss and Brie had both entered the discussion. Professor Whiskers watched from her shoulder as she reached beneath a machine, received a sharp bite on the finger, and lost both rat and cheese beneath a cabinet.

“We’ve spent too much money on you,” she told the darkness.

Eventually she set a humane trap, closed the vents, and locked up. Lunch could not wait indefinitely for science.

Jerry Higgins had already brought doughnuts to the canteen. His shoulder radio had produced a burst of banging on his way in, then static. Experiments upstairs made noises. Security downstairs usually heard about things only when someone needed a door opened.

He handed out powdered jelly doughnuts anyway.

Rufus arrived with Jack’s spotless, disconnected desk phone. Liz Norris, presented with it next, advised calling Communications.

“But the phone doesn’t work,” Jack said.

“Not my department.”

Then something heavy came down the mail chute.

The rumble travelled through the wall and ended in a muffled crash. Bobby B appeared in the canteen doorway, interested to know what had arrived. Sinclair Fields wasn’t expecting laboratory supplies. Maxwell Ducane watched from his lunch, looking as though deliveries ought to know better than to interrupt him.

A second crash followed.

“End of quarter,” Jack said, finishing his quinoa. “Bet it’s party supplies.”

Jerry gave him a pitying look as he went out.

The mailroom contained its usual landscape of accumulated work: piles on the floor, sorted letters on trolleys, a large receiving bag beneath the chute. The pile inside that bag was moving.

“Annie?”

Annie Magee looked around a stack of mail. She had heard the deliveries, yes. She worked in a queue, not a stack. She would get to them.

Jack glanced again at the bag. For one absurd instant, his mind offered Annie’s name for the recommendations list.

“Have you ever seen it do that?”

She went over and shifted some envelopes.

“Jack, I think someone fell down the chute.”

There were signs against that. Jack looked at the warning on the wall, the little broken stick figure illustrating precisely why bodily transit through the pneumatic system was prohibited.

Then Annie reached into the bag, and something pulled her headfirst inside.

Jack caught her kicking legs. He pulled until his shoulders hurt, but whatever held her was stronger.

“Help!”

Her scream carried into the canteen.

Jerry came down the corridor with his truncheon, as fast as his knees allowed. Rufus and Talisa followed. Before they could get Annie free, another body tumbled down the chute: yellow suit, loose limbs, a heavy landing among the mail.

Three figures stirred in the receiving bag. One stood up.

Its eyes were cloudy. Its face had the slack, dreadful stillness of a corpse, although its hands were working. The one holding Annie kept opening its mouth against its own protective visor, trying to reach her through the shield. Another struck her. Her legs jerked in Jack’s arms.

Jerry seized hold beside him. Together they hauled, and still she did not come free.

Talisa studied the faces and movements. She had heard whispers about research upstairs—attempts to bring back the dead. If this was the result, there was very little person left in it. Nothing she thought they could frighten or reason with.

“Fire,” she said. “Possibly separating the head from the body.”

Rufus swung his mop into the creature holding Annie. The impact knocked it sideways, but its flailing brought another cry from her.

Jack spotted the paper trimmer.

He abandoned his failing grip to wrench at its blade. The blade stayed attached. He lifted the whole machine instead, board and all, and swung it with the desperate conviction that this had been a much better idea a moment ago.

The cutting edge missed. The heavy base smashed through a hazmat visor and struck the face behind it.

Now that one’s mouth was unobstructed.

Jerry planted his feet and pulled again. The creature’s grip gave way. He hauled Annie over the rim and clear of the sack. She was beside him now, still inside the mailroom, with the creatures reaching after her.

Talisa turned to Rufus’s cart. Cleaning supplies, a bottle, a rag: familiar materials put to an unfamiliar use. She assembled her firebomb, lit it and threw it at the middle figure.

It missed.

Glass broke against the wall behind the creatures. Flame spread much farther than she had expected, washing over yellow suits and catching the paper heaped below them. The receiving bag lit up. So did Annie’s clothes.

For a moment Talisa could only see how quickly it moved.

Rufus joined Jerry. Together they dragged the burning Annie away from the sack and through the doorway into the corridor.

“Get the mop water!” Rufus shouted.

Annie still had enough sense to mistrust water on burning chemicals. She dropped and rolled, clawing off her cardigan and then her burning trousers. The flames on her went out. She lay breathing hard beside the clothes, bruised and scorched, while Maxwell stood with his mouth open.

Inside the mailroom, one of the creatures tore at its suit. Another came forward burning and hit Jack in the head.

That ended his attempt to improve the situation.

“Sinclair, out! Get out!”

He stumbled after the scientist, one hand pressed to his scalp. Jerry hunted through his key ring as Jack pulled the doors shut. A bump came from the other side. Another. The right key finally turned.

Rufus doused the discarded clothes. Annie’s cardigan was ruined, but her trousers could still be worn. He handed them back, dripping with dirty water, then put his caution sign beside the puddle.

“Did you get bitten?” Jerry asked her.

“I don’t think so. It tried. Its mask was in the way.”

He could see blood and bruising, but no obvious bite. He tried his radio again. Every facility channel answered with static.

Jack stared at the blood on his fingers.

“What just happened?”

“Someone’s experiment got a little loose,” Talisa said.

“A little loose.” Jerry looked at her.

Behind the locked doors came another thump, seemingly from the chute.

Smoke began slipping into the corridor. The handles were hot. No sprinklers came on.

When Jack asked Maxwell for the emergency protocol, the executive recommended evacuation, quickly. Rufus pointed to the sign directing them to the stairs. Jack argued that the fire was here, away from the lift, and he would prefer to go straight to the surface.

“That’s the only fire, huh?” Jerry said, but went with him, truncheon ready.

Rufus took the stairs. Talisa followed. As people passed the puddle, Rufus tapped the wet-floor sign to make sure they noticed.

Maxwell pressed the lift button repeatedly. While they waited, Jack remembered the security office.

“Your cameras can see the other floors, right?”

Some parts of them. Jerry unlocked his little room and sat before the single monitor. Most of the Hollow lay beyond his clearance, but stairs and lift lobbies were considered suitable viewing for Rock Bottom security.

He found their colleagues climbing. On the next feed, the stairs above them had collapsed.

Jack ran to warn them while Jerry kept looking. The remaining stairwell views were empty. On the executive floor, people passed at the edge of a lounge camera’s image, too briefly and at too poor an angle to tell how they were moving.

Walking, perhaps. Perhaps not.

On floor four, the lift doors opened onto an empty shaft.

Outside, Maxwell demanded to know why the lift had stopped.

Jerry looked from the empty shaft on his screen to the indicator claiming the car was there.

He got up.

At the broken stairs, Rufus stood beneath a tangle of fallen structure. No obvious scorch marks explained it. Something very heavy might have fallen through, but he had heard nothing to account for this much destruction.

“The stairs are collapsed!” Jack called from below.

Rufus looked down at him.

Their search produced no rope and no tall ladder. Rufus’s step stool would not bridge the gap. Smoke was spreading downstairs; standing around looking for proper equipment was becoming an expensive habit.

“Furniture,” Jerry suggested. “We could pile it up.”

There was plenty of that. They carried desks, chairs and filing cabinets in pairs, passing the R&D door on the landing. Rufus heard slow movement somewhere beyond it and asked Jerry to lock it before anything found them busy underneath the broken stairs.

Jack called the work a team-building exercise.

Nobody seemed grateful, but when he turned his encouragement toward Talisa, it helped. She worked out the arrangement; Jerry and Rufus shifted the weight. The resulting pile looked climbable. From its top, someone could jump for the ledge.

Bobby went first at Jack’s suggestion. He caught the edge and hung there, unable to pull himself up.

“Okay, kid. I’ve got you.”

Jerry climbed after him and gave him a powerful boost. Bobby scrambled onto the landing.

“Now what?”

“Help the next person.”

His assistance mostly consisted of holding Talisa’s lab coat while Jerry lifted her. Jerry stayed on the furniture and boosted the others until only he remained below.

Jack leaned down, determined to repay him. His effort accomplished very little. Jerry jumped, caught the ledge and hauled himself over, breathing heavily through his moustache.

All nine of them were still there.

They passed Chemical Testing, where Talisa heard only dripping beyond the door, and kept climbing. Then the stairs ended on floor three, at Biolabs.

The executive floor—and the lifts to the surface—was above them.

Maxwell explained that another stairwell could be reached through this floor. He had spent plenty of time upstairs. It was where he belonged.

“They’ll know what to do up there,” Jack said. “Right?”

“They’re probably all dead.”

The answer stopped him.

Maxwell admitted he didn’t know what had happened. But those people in hazmat suits had been trying to contain something, surely, and had failed. When pressed about why that meant the executives were dead, he retreated into clearance and need-to-know.

“I think,” Jack said, “at this point we need to know.”

He could not pull a blade from a paper trimmer or lift Jerry Higgins. This, at least, was something he could do. He kept his voice steady and his attention on Maxwell until the executive’s manner began to give way.

There was a secret laboratory upstairs, Maxwell told them. A field team had brought something back. Not all of the team had survived. He thought the project concerned improving human performance, but he didn’t know exactly what they had recovered or what was being done with it. He was, he admitted, only a low-level executive.

If that laboratory had opened, it might explain where this began.

“Thank you for sharing that, Max.”

“Maxwell.”

“Maxwell. They may call us Rock Bottom, but we’ve been proving ourselves today.”

If they escaped, Maxwell promised to file paperwork for some promotions.

“Some of us,” Jerry repeated.

Jack opened his hands toward the group. Something to work toward. Upward and onward.

Jerry nominated him to go first.

They entered a long corridor under flickering lights. Maxwell believed one door led through to the other stairwell; the farthest was Security. Jerry approached that one with his keys, then stopped to listen.

Slow footsteps. Heavy enough to sound through the door.

He put a finger to his lips and motioned everyone back.

The footsteps grew louder.

They tried the connecting hallway. Maxwell presented his badge. The reader showed no light, made no sound. Rufus tried the handle anyway. Locked.

They retreated toward a door nearer the stairs. Its reader was dead too, but it had a keyhole.

Behind them, the security door began to open.

Jerry found the key just in time.

Beyond lay a cosmetics laboratory, with beakers on workbenches and kennels against one wall. The kennels were empty. Two doors had been ripped open.

A growl came from the shadows.

The dog approaching them was too muscular, its eyes clouded like those behind the broken visor. Cosmetics coloured its face. The absurdity offered no comfort. A second dog emerged beside it.

Jack looked back along the corridor.

The thing leaving Security wore a uniform Jerry recognised. Its body filled the doorway, inhumanly large; it had to duck beneath the corridor ceiling. Jack was nearest to it.

For a moment he could hear his own breathing between those heavy steps.

“I don’t think Cornwell is a good company,” he said.

Jerry tightened his grip on the truncheon. The keys were still in his other hand. Behind him, claws clicked on the laboratory floor; ahead, the uniformed thing bent beneath the lights and came toward them.