LZR-1143: Within by Bryan James

the crusted remnants of Beverly’s blood. She tripped once, but pulled herself up, crying as she heard the sound of footfalls on her left.
    The remaining half of the herd of creatures was paralleling Louis and Bridget’s headlong flight, hemmed in by a wall of cubicles. Merely ten feet away in some places, their ruined faces and bloody arms tracked the two as they sprinted for their last hope, which was drawing inexorably closer.
    Louis watched as at least five of them dragged down the last of the customer retention reps, who had tried to hide in a cubicle but had been discovered. Multiple bite wounds adorned her arms as she pinwheeled onto the floor, overtaken and overwhelmed. They fell on her like lions on a gazelle, and a fountain of blood—Louis assumed it to be from a severed artery—streaked into the air and against the flat screen monitor several feet away.
    He wiped the bile from his mouth, pushing himself the last ten feet. Ahead of him, Bridget fell against the last door, merely twenty feet away from the first of the large group that were staggering forward through the line of cubes. The door blasted open and slammed against the wall of the empty stairwell, and Louis fell through, nearly catapulting himself over the railing as he flew into the relative safety of the hardened walls. He turned to the door, pushing it shut against the hydraulic arm, and cursing as it moved too slowly.
    Bridget reached the external door and paused.
    “How do we know …” she began, but he simply shook his head.
    They didn’t know, but this was the last door. They had no way to see, to look outside and tell if Ty’s fate waited for them. No way to determine if safety existed.
    “Fuck it,” she spat, slamming her hand against the lever and pushing the door outward.
    It stopped only inches from the frame.
    “Shut it, shut it!” he screamed, even as the first body hit the door to the stairwell behind him, fists and hands and feet and mouths and teeth grinding and slamming into the metal from the other side. The door slammed him in the back as Bridget managed to pull hers shut, neatly severing a single pinky finger that fell to the floor of the stairwell landing. She cursed and looked at him struggling against the tide of creatures behind him. Hands were snaking into the gap between the door and the frame, arms pushing through, then faces. Moans sliced into the empty stairwell.
    “Up,” he said, gasping for breath, and then leaping forward, watching as her blue-haired form climbed the first set. He fell forward, gashing his hand on the cement floor and struggling up the first several steps.
    Behind Louis, the door slammed open, several bodies falling through and a stench of foul body odor and the copper smell of blood filtering into his protesting nostrils.
    He followed Bridget up the stairs and through the door to the second floor, listening to the innumerable footfalls behind him.
    “What now?” he said, voice high and panicked. She was looking around anxiously, watching as several heads bobbed clumsily on the far side of the floor.
    Shit. They were upstairs.
    “Gotta be the skylight,” she said curtly, still short of breath. She didn’t pause, didn’t stop. She started to run toward the center of the building.
    “Shit god dammit,” he said under his breath before following. Bodies slammed against the door behind him as he realized that this was it. If they couldn’t get through the only window in the building, the game was over. The building that had for so long crushed his soul, would now reave it from his body. He wanted to scream with the hopelessness of it all.
    Bridget disappeared into the small room in the center of the floor, and as he stumbled in, watched her as she pulled the single table underneath the spot of daylight. She left the table and grabbed the fire extinguisher near the fridge, climbing to the table top and barely pausing before flinging the heavy metal tube toward the window pane.
    Cheap glass