The hallway outside Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, London, Earth.
April 13, 2:11pm, Greenwich Mean Time
Keenan daren’t look back. As he ran, the rabid billionaires, headed by Phillip King the Puma-king, scampered violently towards him, tumbling over each other to get within biting distance. As he desperately ran down the hallway, he caught a sight of the foaming, cantering hoard behind him in a floor length mirror about ten feet ahead, and noted of particular significance that their eyeballs had all turned a strange shade of violet.
He got to the end of the hall, turned right, then ducked into the first reasonably solid-looking door he could find. He shut the door behind him and locked it, using the full weight of his 6”5 frame to press back on it as hard as he could. The room was dark. It smelt of ammonia.
Drat, it was a supply closet.
All at once, the door was pounded ferociously, and Keenan for the first time in his rational, scientific life, considered whether he was a bit naively dismissive of the benefits of religion.
Thankfully, the door was solid enough that it withstood all the force that could be generated by the fists of 30 geriatric hedge fund managers and senior scientists. It was helpful too that it seemed that none of the demons which had suddenly possessed his investors and colleagues had seemed to have retained the ability to use tools, or the knowhow to do a swift run-up and kick like police do in action movies. Instead, it was just the feeble pummelling only 30 sets of arthritic hands can give.
Soon enough, the hoard gave up, and bounded off in search of more pliable prey. Keenan breathed a sigh of relief.
He opened the door just a smidge, but it was s smidge too soon.
Wei Hei - his former head of programming, was standing eerily still about 15 feet from Keenan. She was walking around like an indigenous huntress, clutching a steel signpost she’d presumably uprooted from from the grass in the quadrangle to the left of the hallway, and was holding it menacingly above her head in a spear-like fashion. Normally a calming presence in the office, she now looked positively barbarian.
Keenan leant a little too hard on the door frame, making the hinge creak audibly.
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Wei’s purple eyes were suddenly upon him, and the spear was in the air, hurtling towards the disconcertingly large space between Keenan’s eyes. Keenan’s schoolboy crush on his 5”3 West Chinese colleague evaporated instantly.
Had he shut the door a nanosecond late, Wei’s metal spear would have been introduced quite easily into Keenan’s hippocampus, but instead, it hammered through the door, just missing him as he ducked.
Keenan anxiously looked around the supply closet. Bottles of cleaning fluid, mop buckets, a sign-in sheet on the wall for whoever presumably was employed to use said fluids and mop buckets. A particularly virulent patch of black mould that was eating the left rear corner of the rotting fibreboard roof slats that made up the ceiling.
But no doors.
No means of escape.
Keenan sweated, and sweated some more. And then he revisited his pompous dismissal of religion and its’ progressively more appealing promise of having somewhere nice to go to after one is suddenly impaled by a rusty steel signpost.
Would a Hail Mary help?
Wei Hei, meanwhile, had spent the past few moments inspecting the door handle on the door. She pushed it and pulled it, this way and that. A door handle was something that she had seen and interacted with a million times before, surely. And yet, the information - the neural pathways that had been reinforced every time she had used one were suddenly inaccessible to her. What she did have, however, was a comprehensive knowledge of how heavy blunt objects could be used to bash things that were in her way, so she looked around for something that might do the job.
‘What dat? Dat look hevy,’ she thought rather neolithically.
BANG!
Keenan winced as Wei Hei flung a heavy object (in this case, the fuse box responsible for powering a watering fountain) at the door. It left a dent, which didn’t look good for Keenan’s chances of surviving the next few moments.
In a similar, but inversely proportional way, the dent in the door was rather encouraging to Wei Hei, who felt instinctively that it increased her prospects of making a meal out of whoever was behind it. So she re-martialled her efforts, and took another swing at the door, this time making a small hole.
Keenan, at this stage began hurriedly barricading the door with shelves, mop buckets; anything he could find really, while trying to calm his shaking hands enough to unlock his phone.
He scrolled through his list of contacts, and finally stopped on Dr. Angus’ number.
In these sort of moments when one is surely doing a precarious dance with his mortal end, one might automatically assume that things like swallowing one’s pride, and risking a potentially bankrupting antitrust suit would become easy enough to do, considering the grave alternative. But Keenan was a malignant narcissist, and a wimp, so he erred several groaning moments, until Wei Hei launched the fuse box once more at the door, making the hole large enough that she could dislodge her signpost spear and poke her beady, hungry purple eyes through it.
Sure enough, as Wei Hei started to back up and prepare to launch the signpost through the hole, Keenan’s pride was swiftly swallowed, and he tapped Dr. Angus’ contact, and put the phone on loudspeaker.