FLOOR 21 Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  No part of this work may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2015

  A Kindle Scout selection

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, Kindle Scout, and Kindle Press are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THE GIRL’S STORY

  Recording One

  Recording Two

  Recording Three

  Recording Four

  Recording Five

  Recording Six

  Recording Seven

  Recording Eight

  Recording Nine

  Recording Ten

  Recording Eleven

  Recording Twelve

  Recording Thirteen

  Recording Fourteen

  Recording Fifteen

  Recording Sixteen

  Recording Seventeen

  Recording Eighteen

  Recording Nineteen

  Recording Twenty

  Recording Twenty-One

  Recording Twenty-Two

  Recording Twenty-Three

  Recording Twenty-Four

  Recording Twenty-Five

  Recording Twenty-Six

  Recording Twenty-Seven

  Recording Twenty-Eight

  Recording Twenty-Nine

  Recording Thirty

  Recording Thirty One

  Recording Thirty-Two

  Recording Thirty-Three

  Recording Thirty-Four

  Recording Thirty-Five

  Recording Thirty-Six

  Recording Thirty-Seven

  THE SCAVENGER’S STORY

  Commander Vick’s Report Number One

  Commander Vick’s Report Number Two

  Commander Vick’s Report Number Nine

  Commander Vick’s Report Number Thirteen

  Commander Vick’s Report Number Sixteen

  Commander Vick’s Report Number Seventeen

  Commander Vick’s Report Number Eighteen

  Commander Vick’s Report Number Nineteen

  THE BATTER’S STORY

  Recording Thirty-Eight

  Recording Thirty-Nine

  Recording Forty

  Recording Forty-One

  Recording Forty-Two

  Recording Forty-Three

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To create an acknowledgments page is tricky. In trying to acknowledge everyone that influenced the creation of this work, I’m forced to dig deep and imagine everyone that influenced the characters and settings or who simply pushed me to be the best writer that I could be. To that end I want to first thank the entire team at Amazon that has helped bring this work to light. Thank you for putting up with my repeated e-mails and for helping get this novel into the hands of readers. Speaking of which, thank you readers, because I wouldn’t write if I didn’t feel I had a chance to make a positive impact on someone’s day. Next, I wish to thank all my friends that put up with my nonsense. I’m dramatic and moody at times, but so it goes with writers. Our heads are in the clouds and we are always looking for the next adventure. Thanks to all of you who have accompanied me on my journey. Specifically I’d like to thank Josh and Jamila for being around for so long. A special acknowledgment to Jamila, for her passion for entertainment and the inspiration that ignites in others. To my friend Winston, thank you for always being encouraging and having a positive word for me. A very unique thank you to Christina Coleman, the best reporter on the planet and a person that helped fuel my ambition at times when I felt unsure in my ability to pursue my writing goals. Of course, I cannot end an acknowledgments page without thanking my parents. I’m sure they were never quite sure what to make of me. I was never quite sure what to make of myself, either. But they were always supportive and loving, and in this world those are two of the greatest gifts you’ll ever get. I wrote this book with the theme of being remembered and I can promise I will always love and remember all of you for your ongoing support.

  THE GIRL’S STORY

  Recording One

  My name is Jackie, and it’s not so bad living here. Seriously. At least, I don’t think so anyway, but I guess it’s hard to say. Then again, I’ve never really been anywhere else. I’ve rarely even been below Floor 12. My parents won’t let me. They say things get bad down there, so I have to stay up here, on the higher levels.

  Don’t get me wrong; I mean, I wish I didn’t have to. Things get kind of boring, walking the same halls every day. I’m always trying to find something new to do, but it’s kinda hard when you’ve lived your whole life in the same tower. Sometimes I’ll wander up to the rooftop, where we have the gardens. That’s where all of our food comes from, so we all take turns planting and harvesting. I don’t mind the work, actually, unless it means pulling carrots. Those suckers are really hard to yank out of the dirt.

  When I think of it, it’s actually kind of annoying having to go to the rooftop, and not just because of the work. It’s really more about what we have to pass by as we head up there. So, the top level of the Tower is Floor 1. None of us are allowed inside, so every time we go up the stairs, we’re forced to stare at that big, golden number—the number “1” that sits on the locked entry door. I really wish I knew what was inside, but you know, nobody’s allowed in. Instead, we just have to pass by every few days when it’s our turn to work the gardens. You might as well string some candy in front of my face and tell me I’m not allowed to eat it.

  Of course, you can’t just pick vegetables all day. That gets boring quick. Besides, most of the time I’m in school. Well, school’s probably too strong a word for it. We meet most days of the week in the library on Floor 6. Our teacher, Mrs. Bloom, tries to lead class the best she can. It’s just too bad our books aren’t great. A lot of them are about to fall apart, and most of them were scavenged from the lower floors. I’m not talking about something like Floors 13 or 14. I’m not even talking about Floor 21. I mean the books were taken from way down below . . . like, as far down as Floor 30.

  I know, right? I can’t believe it myself. That’s what we have the Scavengers for, though. Without them we’d never get new books or supplies. They’re pretty much the bravest people in the Tower. They say that anyone who makes it onto a scavenging team is the type that could have been a police officer or even a soldier before all this happened. I mean, that makes sense. They wear all that riot gear, and it looks like they know how to fight. Sucks, though, since as tough as they are, every once in a while we lose one of them. That just goes with the territory of being a Scavenger.

  Point is, life is only livable because of them since it’s not like we’re rolling in things to do. Sometimes I’ll sit around in the lobby with the other kids and watch movies on the Blu-Ray player, but that doesn’t always work. For instance, if it’s a really cloudy day, then the solar panels on the roof will die out, which always sucks for everyone. If we want light then, we have to burn candles, and we don’t have many of those. Then again, we don’t really have lightbulbs, either. Well, we have a few. Want to take a guess where we get those from? Yeah. Scavengers. We get everything from them.

  I kinda always wanted to be one. Who wouldn’t want to be? They get to see stuff from a long time ago, before we had to live on the top of the Tower. Speaking of that, nobody really talks about the Before, and I’m not even sure how much anyone knows about it. I guess i
t makes sense to think that once upon a time we lived on the lower floors. Maybe even the ground . . . if there is a ground. I’ve never met anyone that’s seen it, not even the Scavengers, and they’ve been farther down the Tower than anyone.

  When you stop and think about it, I mean, our lives don’t make sense. We couldn’t have always lived up here, right? It gets me pretty antsy thinking about it because, I mean, this is a tower, so we had to have come up the stairs at some point. Didn’t we?

  I don’t know, and thinking about it gets me frustrated. When I’m in this kind of mood, I go to the rooftop and look out. You can actually see other towers rising up in the distance. Some aren’t even that far from ours. I stare at them, and I’m just like . . . is anybody over there? Is anybody looking back at me? Does anybody know or remember we’re trapped in this place?

  Or are we all that’s left?

  After I’ve gotten myself sufficiently depressed, I’ll stare over the edge of the roof, trying to see how far below I can look. Thing is, it’s impossible to see much. This tower just vanishes into the Darkness. Nobody, and I mean nobody, even knows why. It’s just blackness down there.

  Oh, about Floor 12. Yeah, that’s where the Creep really starts. The Creep? It’s this . . . gunk. Super-disgusting stuff that you shouldn’t touch because it makes you feel weird, and the lower down the Tower you go, the more you see it. It starts to cover the walls, and it’s kinda gross. It’s really slick, like saliva, and it looks all muscle-y. Almost alive. Good thing you don’t have to worry about it when you’re higher than Floor 11. Still, I wonder what it is. We all do. I know that when you touch it, you can start hallucinating. I did once. Well, okay, I’m lying. I’ve touched it a few times when I’ve been on the lower levels, which is why my parents made the rule that I couldn’t head down there in the first place. I mean, I don’t pay attention to them, but I get why they don’t want me going that far below into the Tower. The Creep makes you see . . . things. Shadowy things. Sometimes they’re right in front of you, but most of the time, they’re in the corner of your eye. They say that by Floor 21, you don’t even have to touch the Creep to hallucinate, which is a total trip. Must suck to live down there.

  Still, I wonder. I wonder about this all the time, actually. I wonder about what’s below Floor 21.

  Um, Mom told me I should start recording my thoughts when I’m in these kind of moods, so this one might be short. I mean duh, it’s my first one. At first when she said I should record myself, I was like, okay, no. Because she’s crazy, and I don’t want to seem crazy, too. That’s no exaggeration by the way. I mean, she’s been a total whacko ever since I turned thirteen. Also, I mean, who cares about what I have to say? It’s not like I’m ever going to listen to this.

  But . . . here I am. Probably because I really am going as crazy as her, but also because I go nuts thinking about how nobody else cares that we’re trapped here. I get it, we’re alive, so we should be grateful. But do you know how insane it makes me being the one person asking “why” when everyone else is acting like this is just the way things are? God.

  Anyway, guess I’ll try to keep this up. I’m supposed to meet with Allison tonight. Don’t know what we’ll do. Try to find a new movie in the Blu-Ray collection, I guess. I think one of the boys said the Scavengers hauled up a game system from the Deep Creep. I haven’t seen one since I was a kid. The last one we had broke when I was, like, ten. That’s what? Seven years. Dang. I’d really like to play a video game again.

  Recording Two

  Should I start these off by saying “Second Recording” or “Recording Two”? I don’t know. I guess nobody’s going to care how I document myself. I mean, who’s going to listen to this, right? I probably won’t. Why would I? I’m just recording this so I don’t get as psycho as Mom has.

  Which, by the way . . . I haven’t gone psycho, right? Sounds like I’m trying to convince myself. It’s just that I feel like ever since I turned seventeen, life is just . . . weird. Different.

  Hard.

  About turning seventeen. Wow, yeah. I’m getting old. That’s depressing.

  Speaking of old, the oldest person I know is Mr. McCauley. He lives in apartment 8-12. Uh, should I explain that? Everyone knows that the apartments are labeled by floor and room, right? Eighth floor, room twelve. Yeah, anyway, that’s Mr. McCauley’s place. Guy’s eighty-four years old. Eighty-four. Think about that. He’s that old, and even he doesn’t really know about what happened before the Before. He claims that a long time ago, there was no Darkness and no Creep. Duh, everyone says that, so it’s not like he’s some fountain of secret wisdom or anything.

  But he does say interesting stuff, like, that this tower was old even when the Darkness came. Like, super-old. He says this place used to be for poor people who couldn’t live in nicer towers, but when I ask him where the nicer towers were or what they were like, he just kind of mumbles and trails off. Weird old guy, but I like him. Still, I don’t think he actually lived before the Before. Unless someone wiped his memory or something. The reason I say that is because if he’d lived before the Darkness came, he’d have, I dunno, more details or something. He doesn’t know when the Scavenging started, and he doesn’t know what it was like to be outside the tower. He can’t even tell me what the ground was like. Honestly I get the feeling he’s just telling me stories he heard from other people. Maybe from people that came before him. That would mean we’ve been living at the top of this tower for more than eighty-four years, at least. I can’t imagine that.

  How did I even start talking about this, anyway? Wait, I was going to talk about my birthday. That’s right, I was going to start talking about how depressing that was. Yeah, Mom was trying her best to keep her head together, which she’s barely been able to do since I was a kid. It’s like the minute I became a teenager, she lost it. Now she’s always so flighty. I guess I just don’t get her anymore, you know? One day she’s acting like she doesn’t have a care in the world, and the next day she’s so depressed that she doesn’t get out of bed. I worry about her, but it’s been like this for a long time. Sometimes I feel like just giving up on her, but, I mean, it’s Mom. Who just stops talking to their mom? Plus, she was at least putting in an effort that day. And Dad? Dad was . . . working. I don’t exactly know what he does, but I know his job is on Floor 3. That’s where they do science stuff. So anyway, my birthday was going good enough, I guess. There’s a conference room on Floor 4, where I live, and every kid’s birthday gets celebrated there. Well, except Tommy’s, but that because his Mom’s more of a nutter than mine. They had his party on the rooftop, which was pretty dang depressing. Celebrating a birthday beneath endlessly black clouds . . . Yeah. Happy birthday, Tommy.

  But no, mine was definitely more depressing. A lot more, which sucks since things were going fine enough until the alarms went off. You’ve got a dozen kids my age trying to enjoy cake, and can we please remember that cake isn’t exactly something we can cook easily here? Anyway, we’re just trying to eat our cake when the alarm sirens go off. Yeah, exactly, right in the middle of eating something you can literally only order for yourself once a year.

  I never exactly found out what happened, but I’ve got an idea. I had a chance to talk with the other kids about this, and it turns out Allison’s dad is in Security. Man, what a bad end of the straw. I’d hate to be picked for Security. It’s like having the risks of being a Scavenger but never being allowed to explore the Deep Creep, so what’s the point?

  Anyway, Allison says there was a Creep infestation. It doesn’t happen too often, but when it does, just . . . damn. The entire tower feels like a hornet’s nest. Everyone gets antsy, starts buzzing around, and then lockdown kicks in, and we’re all forced inside our rooms.

  Maybe I should explain that a bit more. See, the Creep doesn’t stay put, waiting for you to die. It’ll straight up hunt you when it wants. The people down on the lower floors are in charge of pushing it back whenever it starts to move, but they don’t always get the
job done. The problem is when the Creep gets into something and starts making its way up. Maybe it gets into an old elevator shaft, or maybe it finds its way up some old piping. That’s okay. When that happens, it’s easy enough to get rid of. I hear fire normally does the job.

  Once in a while, though . . . it just gets up into the halls. Fast. I never got the full story about what happened, but if I heard right, it crawled straight up the stairwell. That’s bad, and not like a “we’ll be okay” kind of bad. It’s real bad, since the stairwell’s our only way of moving between floors. It’s blocked up below Floor 21 specifically to keep the really bad Creep from pushing up into the higher levels. Like I’ve said, though, Creep’s kinda in a lot of places from Floor 12 downward. Nothing too intense, but bad enough.

  There are days when the Creep gets angry, though. Sounds weird, right? How does something like that get angry? How should I know? All I know is that it does. It starts to pulse and grow real fast, and if it were ever to choke up the stairwell, it’d be impossible for us to travel up or down the Tower. So when it does get angry and we’re all stuck in our rooms, that’s called a lockdown. These automated iron shutters lock in front of our doors, and the only people allowed in the halls are Security, who have to track down the source of the Creep growth and do whatever it takes to get rid of it. Most of the time that means flamethrowers, but I heard guns that day. Lots of them. I don’t know how firing bullets at the Creep helps, but there’s nothing else they could have been firing at.

  I hope.

  Worst part is that lockdown went all night and kept going until noon the next day. I was never able to fall asleep. I just kept staring out of my window, looking at the other towers in the distance and wondering why we can’t get out of here. I’m not sure what’s worse, the flinching I did when the gunfire started or how I got used to it after a few hours. Dad wasn’t able to get home that night, and Mom pretended as if she couldn’t hear anything. She just read a book all night. Yeaaaah, kinda crazy, but I guess I don’t blame her, I mean, that night really sucked. Major. You could hear screaming now and again, and the next day there were a few people missing. I guess they must have been part of Security, too. They’re gone now.