So I started writing this a few years ago, I guess, but never finished it. I found it when I found Final Tears, and went ahead and finished it. It doesnt quite have the feeling i wanted it to have, I wish it was a little more surreal, but this is what you get. Please lemme know what you think.

Brea

Where was the door? For the love of God, where was the fucking door! Fumbling in the horrifying darkness for what seemed like hours, the young women engulfed in smoke gasped as her fingers met the warm metal of the door handle. Wrenching the door open, it was all she could do to force her way out into the hallway and the even thicker mass of blackness.

“Sarah!” Catching her breath and taking off down the hallway, feet flying as fast as she could towards the office at the end of the hall.

“Carrie?” It was like a blessing, hearing the voice of her best friend from behind her, and Carrie nearly slammed into the wall in her rush to turn around.

“Sarah? Thank God you’re all right! Where’s John?” A wave of worry flooded through her as Sarah’s face was slightly illuminated by the beam of a flashlight in held in her hands; the other girl looked worse than terrified, and not all of it was for herself.

“He went upstairs just before the crash.”

Oh God!

Taking the offered flashlight from her friend’s hands, she looked into the abyss that surrounded them.

“We can’t stay here, the smokes getting worse. We should take the stairs. C’mon”

Feeling a tug on her hand, Carrie turned back around to look at Sarah. “Sarah, c’mon, let’s go!”

“Carrie-“ She was interrupted by a cough as they struggled to breath “Carrie, what about John? We have to find him!”

“Sarah! The crash came from above, we can hardly breath as it is. We don’t even know if he’s still-“ Carrie stopped, she couldn’t say it about John. “-Look, John’s a smart guy, he’s probably already down below us, on his way outta the building. Now let’s go!”

And the two girls sprinted down the hallway, searching frantically for the door to the stairwell.

How many floors had they passed? How many doors had smoke billowing from the cracks? How many windows had the orange glow of flames been seen through? How long had it been since the crash?

Those questions and more raced through her head as Carrie ran, jumping three steps at a time with Sarah by her side. They could hardly breathe through the thick, black smoke.

“Carrie?” At Carrie’s grunt, Sarah continued, gasping heavily “-How far from the ground floor do you figure we are?”

“No idea.” A gasp for air. “Let’s just concentrate on getting there, okay?”

It seemed like days later, just as the women were running out of their last breath, that the smoke thinned and they reached a dead end.

“You think this is it?” Sarah shrugged.

“Might as well try it.”

It was as they were pushing open the wooden door, beams from their flashlights bouncing on the near bye wall, that they heard it.

Another crash.

They froze.

Sarah turned to Carrie, eyes wide with fear. “The other tower?”

“We need to get out of here. Now!”

And they resumed pushing, but they weren’t met with the sight of the lobby. Instead, what greeted them was another hallway, almost free from smoke and packed with people. Grabbing the arm of the nearest body, Sarah asked what was happening as Carrie tried to see above the heads of the people shoved into the narrow hall.

“The stairway’s blocked, we’re trying to get into the service stairwell, but it’s locked and not one damn person has the key.”

Carrie turned away from her effort to look at the man; “What floor is this?”

“The eighteenth. There’s an elevator back that way, but it’s beyond use, we need to get into the stairwell.” Carrie could barely hear the man over the din of the crowded hallway, but for a split second thought she saw a service sign pointing down another hallway. Calling Sarah to her, Carrie began pushing back down the hallway and around the corner into a much emptier hallway.

Following the signs, the two girls came to a maintenance room at the end of the hall, just a nondescript door in the back corner. But it would probably have a few master keys for the floor in it.

Trying the door with a sense of urgency at the rapidly worsening situation, Sarah cried with frustration. “The goddamned door is locked. This is fucking ridiculous!” But Carrie wasn’t paying attention. There was a small window by the door through which she could see a ring of keys.

“We need to break through the door. We have to get those keys!” Carrie searched the nearby walls frantically for anything to help them through, but it seemed as if they weren’t getting any help from conveniently placed fire axes.

But they were beginning to gain attention from the people in the hallway as the man they’d been speaking to followed behind them. A few of the other men stepped foreword, rallied by the man from before – whom Carrie now recognized as Richard from three floors below her office – to stand near the door.

“I figure it’s impossible to break through the door, or else we would have done it at the stairwell.” Richard said as Carrie and Sarah stepped back. “But that man there,” Richard gestured at a man kneeling to look through the small window Carrie had noticed. “He thinks that he can break the window and reach the handle from the outside. If it’s a simple button lock, he should be able to open the door from out here.”

As the three spoke, the man at the door was acting. Wrapping a suit jacket around his fist and pulling back to hit the window, he just barely managed a thin, hairline crack down the center. Three more hits, and small pieces of glass were falling onto the floor and the man pulled his fist back and replaced it with his foot. A few well placed kicks and the window shattered. Then the door was open and someone was rushing inside to retrieve the set of keys from the desk.

In what seemed like seconds compared to the eternity since their flight from the office, Carrie and Sarah burst through the lobby doors alongside the group of people who had conjugated in the hallway. Ushered out of the way by firemen and police, the two women found themselves giving their names and being pushed out the front doors of the building and into the smoggy sunshine.

“Oh my God.” Carrie looked at Sarah after her incredulous statement, before redirecting her gaze to the place her friend was looking. “Holy shit.”

The girls could only stand and stare as far above them, the building they had worked in for years belched smoke and flames, transforming from the familiar modern skyscraper and into a gape-mouthed monster. Ash and smoke billowed everywhere, coating the ground like a thick grey blanket of snow. Emergency personnel rushed in and out of the building, ushering people to relative safety and putting out small fires here and there.

“Excuse me, Miss?” Carrie turned to look at the young fireman behind her. “We’re shuttling people away from the sight, you both need to move as far away from the towers possible and find a way home.” Carrie nodded and she and Sarah turned from the building and down a nearby street.

Two weeks later Carrie and Sarah sat silently in a small church on the outskirts of the city. In front of them, on a small platform, sat a picture of John as he’d been before the attack. He’d never made it out of the building. As far as they knew, he’d never made it off the floor. Among the rubble they hadn’t even found a full body. Carrie wondered if they could have saved him, if they’d gone upstairs after the crash. Or if he’d even already been dead then. All she knew was that her friend had died, and she was lucky to be alive.