8 Minutes

A young man has to make a life-threatening journey to the top of a building and back down again to avoid a grisly, frigid death. And he's on the clock. 

Short horror and science fiction stories, narrated by the author. If you'd like to see more, consider subscribing to my Substack at areldridge.substack.com.

Transcript

He watched Alice blow on her hands and pull the fur-lined hoody tighter around her, reducing her face to a pale, frightened moon.

“C’mon Lenny, we have to go. I don’t want to be fighting to get on when the doors close.”

He was sweating now, despite the rapidly dropping temperature, panicking as he rifled through his cargo pants. He’d had had it. It had been right there. He could have sworn his chipcard was right there in his wallet.

Except it wasn’t.

For years, people had told him to get the implant.

I wouldn’t go out with a loosie, man, what happens if you lose it before the Twilight Freeze at a terminal?

And that is precisely what had happened. He’d been fooling around with his pockets trying to rearrange them, getting the card out to impress some kids who’d never seen a loosie before.

Whoah, you have to show them a card? That’s weird as hell.

Mandatory implant at birth these days. Had been that way since Chanderton’s second term.

He could hear his sister’s breath quicken as she came to the same realization.

“You don’t have it do you?” Her eyes widened and cast around the station in panic, trying desperately to find something fixed to settle on.

“It … it must still be up in the park. Those kids.”

“But they gave it back. They gave it back, Lenny, I saw them!”

“I know but I … I don’t remember taking it. I think I left it on the ground, still up there. I have to go back up.”

She moaned a long, elliptical curse.

“There’s still eight minutes. I can be back in six, it’s fine.” He had already made his mind up, was walking alongside her, loosening his body and preparing to jump into a long lope back up the escalator.

“Jesus,” she said, shaking her head. He could see the potential scenarios accumulating in her mind. Alternate futures bubbling over like tacky yellow scum on the meniscus of a cauldron.

In a few seconds, he was vaulting over the rails of the escalator. Security had already turned off most of the machinery. Anything moving would be frozen stiff in the course of the evening. Much easier to come by and dethaw tomorrow if there were no moving parts, rather than fighting the grim descent into kelvin.

He bolted up it, skidding round the corner. The next one had already been fenced off, the big stainless steed eyelid swinging closed to shield it. Damnit. He would be tempting fate trying to climb over the enclosure with the temperature dropping, and why bother? The risk of his skin sticking to the freezing metal became exponentially more likely as things became colder. He’d have to take the stairs.

He looked around, saw the hydraulic double doors of the emergency exit. Still open for now. He bolted into the cold, unlit grey of the stairwell. Retrieving his phone for light, he began the slow ascent. Running now through endlessly repeating landings until he became disorientated and forgot which direction he was facing. Every now and then a door would pop out and he would get his bearings again. It was like running through an M.C. Escher painting. He’d count the doors as he ran up them. Thirteenth floor. Twelfth. Eleventh. Tenth.

By the time he’d got to the ground floor he was winded and panting, dragging his feet as he went. He checked his phone. Two minutes had elapsed. He had five more for a margin of safety.

He approached the final door, a weird seafoam green with hydraulic struts that gave it a cyberpunk look and threw it open. The sight was ghastly.

The sky roiled above in purple, carmine and black. Flashes of yellow cut across it, marbling the bruised firmament in brief, gasping illumination. He could already see a rind of frost coating the metal seating, the limestone walls and baubled pillars that made up the town square above the terminal. He ran to where they’d been sitting, smoking, talking. Not thinking of the grisly frigid death that hung over him now like the sword of Damocles.

He had never seen the Twilight Freeze in real time. Only on screens.

You learned to forget about it, to compartmentalize, the way you did deaths on the news. Every so often someone would go, be taken, get lost in the storm. It was always someone’s uncle or a loose-canon kid you barely knew at the school you used to go to. Nobody you really cared about. No-one real.

He’d seen a mindshort once that said a solar storm put out 5 sieverts of radiation a minute. But that couldn’t all be focused in one place. It was diffused over a large area. Surely.

He scrabbled over to the patch of astroturf they’d been sitting on – the cockroach of the flora world, the only thing capable of surviving the nightly nuclear winter – and began frantically pouring over it, using his hands to feel in case his eyes deceived him.

It’s not here. It’s not fucking here!

Desperate now, he raised his eyes, scanning casting his flashlight wildly over the homogenous, green of the Chill Zone. That name now took on a ghoulish, grinning irony.

His mind began to rattle off alternatives like a chatbot: he could sneak on. Maybe hide himself in the crowd until they got to Checkpoint Gamma. Or steal someone’s gloves and hide under the train until they reached a heated zone.

They wouldn’t really throw him off. Not into the night, not into the cold. That didn’t really happen. His hands were beginning to tingle and, as he looked down, he noticed they were faintly pinkish in the wan light of his phone.

Ping. The phone flashed the notification from Alice.

It’s here.

I got the card. I picked it up.

A wave of relief washed over him, followed immediately by the icy clutch of panic. How long did he have?

He ran back to the seafoam green doors. They had closed while he was looking for the card. Shitfuckshit.

He beat on the door, pushing and trying to pry it open. “Goddamn it, fuck you open!” he screamed, knowing it would do nothing and not caring. He gave himself roughly two and a half seconds of self-pity then redirected his plan. The only other way back to the terminal was down the escalators. The escalators that were now hermetically sealed in stainless steel sarcophagi.

The temperature had gone below frigid. Minus five degrees? Minus 10? It could be minus thirty with wind chill if it kicked up. That steel beam would be cold as hell and slippery.

One way down, he thought. Well, maybe two, an evil part of his mind gibbered at him.

He was running out of time. It was possible, possible, that only the top doors were sealed. If he could make it down this one escalator, he might be able to bust into the doors. He took his parker off and immediately the cold went through him like a blade. He brought it down to his kidneys and held the sleeves between him and the piping. Then he sat down on the cold death pipe and put his feet down in front of him. Indeed, it felt slippery. He looked down and could see the dimming light of the terminal beneath him.

A single nickel, jagged loose from the pocket of his jacket fell and as he watched its slow careen, turning end over end in what felt like slow motion, he felt his stomach take the same sickening drop that that coin did.

The sound it made when it hit the bottom several seconds later was as clear and sweet as a child’s hymnal, ringing out like a bell in the frosty air.

He felt like he was about to throw up.

Gingerly, he moved his butt a little way down, shimmying. Fine so far. It would be the feet that were the real test. He shuffled them down a bit. He was wearing vintage Vans, the skate edition with the crosshatched siping. As they moved down, he could feel them catch. So far, so good.

He progressed down a little ways, a foot at a time. Once he slipped a little bit but held back and paused. When he was halfway down he could make out the door. It was still open. Yes, yes, thank fuck yes.

As though his thoughts, the very concept of salvation itself, were sacrilege at that second the piston’s began to make a hissing sound. Slowly, brutally slowly, the doors began to swing shut.

There was no choice. Not really. With a bark of rage and futility, he released the jacket and put his full weight on the beam. Miraculously, the shoes didn’t slip and he propelled himself upright, fully aware that any false movement, any slip could lead to his pancaking on the polished tile below.

He had to get to that door. The alternative was for the punters who came up tomorrow to find a human icicle. A corpse, snap frozen then beaten to death with radiation in an ion storm. He wouldn’t go out like that.

Now he was edging his way very carefully down the beam, step after careful, (but, let’s be honest, hurried) step. The final slip didn’t come until he was only a foot away, in the way that someone carrying an overfull tray of water to a freezer will panic — that last instant of Oh God let it be over — and his feet seemed to fly out from under him. He fell forward, his hand landing on the edge of the beam, the other arm shielded by the yielding cotton of his long sleeve shirt. That one hand though.

He tried to move it. It was stuck frozen in place. And yet as the pressure of gravity built, the slow momentum of the rest of his body came up behind him, caught in some awful, godless Twister pose. The flesh of his palm, caught in three separate places could not help but capitulate to gravity’s rolling tide and as it did, the flesh was shorn clear off in limp, pinkish strips. He howled and slid further down the steel beam that had recently been an escalator and managed to catch the side of the wall before sliding off into the abyss. He felt the wet squelch of his ultra-violet scourged hand against the wall. He felt the squelch but not so much the pain. That would come later.

Hauling himself off this death trap, he skittered across the floor and only just managed to hurl himself between the closing doors. Fuck. Goddamn.

How long did he have left? It didn’t matter. He just had to get to the bottom. Get back to Alice and the card.

He ran, pelted. The way down was faster but no easier and he nearly fell multiple times, the flashlight giddily lighting his way down the endless concrete steps.

Ping. Hurry they’re closing the doors!

He ran, clutching his injured hand, out of the stairwell swearing and sweating as he did. He was running, gambolling with the force of his gangly legs propelling him forward, rising upward toward his chest in a runner’s dance. He could see the train now. The grey doors sliding shut with implacable precision.

He was too far. Too far by perhaps three seconds. He realized he was not going to make it. He slowed, too winded and tired and in pain to care.

All his life it had seemed he had fallen victim to slowly closing doors: the door to school, then college had slammed in his face, the door to a steady upbringing, booming shut with his father’s death from cancer, forcing him to functionally raise Alice in his fucked-up, coping-mechanism duct-tape-and-chewing-gum way.

It seemed fitting now that death would be another slowly closing door, one he had been just a little too slow to catch.

Alice’s hand shot out through the crush, preventing the door from closing. It would not have hurt her, the doors had a built-in sensor, but he couldn’t help but wince to see his little sister’s delicate hand be the threadbare pinion that prevented his existence being crushed under an avalanche of frozen oxygen and hydrogen particles.

“Get in you idiot,” she said, muffled from the back. The hand held out his loosie ID chipcard. God bless her.

He took it, in his good hand, nearly fumbled it and stepped his way into the train.

“Didn’t think you’d make it back,” she mumbled.

“I wasn’t so sure myself,” he said. The doors closed and the train began it’s chug out of the station.

That’s when the power cut out.