Death cheaters

Death cheaters - A vision and a note. Chapter 3

A blue pen falling. A glass of water being filled. A cracking sound on the floor. The spinning door, stuck. A piece of rubble falling over his head. Then, everything goes black.

Dan opens his eyes once again. He's sitting in his office,in front of his desk. The big round silver clock in front of him reminds him it's still noon. The smaller red hand resonates through the hole office every second.

"How will I know when all that will happen?" Dan whispers still trembling.

Four hours ago, he cheated death twice, and now, he'll have to do it again.

The whole building is on lock-down due to a fire drill. He can't leave until it's over. If he tries to leave before, he could be fired. He's now trapped on the seventeenth floor of a twenty five-story building.

'Should I be here? Should I be out of the office in the cubicles?', Dan repeats to himself in his head.

In the vision, he couldn't notice anything specific. There was no sense of time either.

The pen is the same all workers are given when they are hired. It could be falling from his desk, or from one of the other seven private offices, or from one of the forty cubicles outside. The glass of water could only happen either on the north or south corner of his level, there's where the water dispensers are.

His forehead is full of sweat. His heart pounds hard in his chest.

The sound of a pen hitting the floor just outside of his office makes him jump from his grey leather chair and run towards the door.

The door slams in his office when he opens it, making everybody outside turn to look at him.

On the cubicle just ahead, a red pen lies on the floor.

"Is that the pen that fell a second ago?", he asks to the young brown haired girl sitting a few feet away.

"Y-yes, Mr. Clarke. Why?", asks the startled young girl.

"I-I'm sorry. I thought...", he's interrupted by the sound of another pen that fell a couple of cubicles at his right.

Again he runs to see what kind of pen was. A black and gold pen. The owner, a middle-aged blonde man, is as freaked as the rest of the office.

"Dan, are you O.K.?", asks Luke, one of his closest colleagues. "You look rather pale and sweaty"

"I just...", he says. 'Don't want to die', he thinks. "I'm just anxious. B-because of the drill", Dan mumbles.

"Don't worry man, it's just a drill", he says calmly while touching his right shoulder. "Go back to your office and relax. When it's over, we'll go for some beers, deal?"

"Deal", answers Dan with a fake grin.

While Dan walks back to his office, he can feel how everybody stares at him, piercing him.

He sits on his chair again, with a lost stare.

"This is it", he mutters. "This is how I'm going to die"

He opens the right drawer and grabs a blue pen, the same blue pen he saw in his dream. He grins ironically.

"I don't think that throwing you purposefully to the floor will help me, would it?", he says to the pen.

He looks at the clock on his wall. Twelve sixteen o'clock. He grabs a piece of paper from his note pad and starts writing.

>

His hand shakes. He's given up. But, how could he accept death? What should you say when you know you'll die?.

The sound of his phone scares the crap out of him, throwing the pen to the air. It lands on the desk and rolls toward the edge. It stops an inch from falling.

The phone keeps ringing. For a second, Dan thought that he would see the first sign that could save him. He sighs and picks up the phone.

"Hello?", he says.

"Run. Run right now", an anxious woman's voice says. It sounds oddly familiar.

"Who is this?", he asks frowning.

"Don't think. Just run your ass off and meet me at the emergency stairs. Second floor. DO NOT use the elevators if you want to survive. GO!", the woman hangs up the phone.

Dan hangs up so hard while standing up that he causes the blue pen to fall from his desk, but not in the way he saw in his vision. He doesn't stop.

Runs out of his office. The building starts shaking when he gets to the door that leads to the emergency stairs. The sound of several pens falling catches his attention for a second. The sound of a glass being filled throws a chill down his spine that forces him to resume his run.

The shaking gets stronger. He can hear the building tearing itself apart. He jumps as many stairs as he can to get to the second floor faster.

At the fourth floor, the stairs get crowded. There's no time to be nice. He pushes through men and women, both young and old. Pieces of the building fall all around him.

When he finally gets to the second floor, he finds a redheaded girl, the one he saw in the morning. She's standing in a corner, completely still.

"You?", says Dan confused.

"Yes, me", she answers smiling. "Come close, now!", says the girl hugging Dan close to her.

The shaking is so intense, that all the people that were trying to evacuate the building are thrown to the ground.

A big crack starts to form in the wall, three feet over them. It grows around them, getting wider every second.

The building tilts away from them. The staircase is the only thing that stands straight.

People screaming. People falling. People being crushed. He sees it all. Not just one life, Dan sees one death after the other.

A falling woman, the one who dropped the red pen, falls right over Dan and the redheaded girl, killing them.

He opens his eyes.

"Move!", both of them scream at the same time and walk down the last three steps of the staircase that are still standing. The corpse falls in front of them, splashing blood over their clothes and face.

The woman's skull is open. Her legs are twisted. One arm is under the body, the other one has a bone protruding from her forearm.

They look closer. The blood soaked hand starts to move. When it stops, a red sentence is lying on the floor.

"You BOTH are mine".