Here's Part I:
On a whim on the way home from work one day the wife of a police officer bought a bright yellow Humvee. She laughed maniacally as she drove it 27 miles home, a drive she had never enjoyed before this one. Her daughters were excited, her husband confused, but she had returned all of her Christmas presents every year since her marriage, shopped only at thrift stores and always clipped coupons, and they felt she deserved this one indulgence.
The next morning she arrived at work to find her co-worker dead, in the center of exploded chaos.
She was the first one in that morning, as usual she got there early to avoid morning traffic (although this morning’s drive had taken half an hour longer due to a detour past her high school nemesis’ neighborhood in her flashy Humvee). Just seconds after she arrived, another earlybird co-worker, Kent, showed up and was still reacting to the scene as she picked up the phone to dial 911.
But she couldn’t decide whether to dial 8 first, which would direct the call to the external emergency number, or to dial 911 without the 8 so the call was directed to the internal emergency number that was for the kinds of things that weren’t supposed to leak out to the media.
As she paused, Kent found his voice. “What the hell happened here, Deena?” He asked her.
“I don’t know!” She said, phone still off the hook, finger suspended just above the keypad. “I think John’s dead!”
John was clearly dead. He lay crumpled beneath a broken window. Everything that had been on the windowsill was broken all around him, including a dead plant they had been watering for the last two months and hoping to revive. John looked like he had been subjected to a very hot, shortly lived fire, as his clothes were all black, his hair was gone and his glasses covered in soot. His mouth hung open. No breath came from it.
Kent walked over to John’s body and inspected it briefly, then turned towards Deena, his eyes closed, gagging.
The room was rather cold. It smelled pretty badly too. It was easy to leave.
They left, and went into the darkened lab across the hall. Nobody was in yet on the floor. The sun wasn’t yet up, and this side of the building revealed a stunning view of the city’s downtown.
“Did you call the police yet?” Kent asked.
“No, do we dial out?”
They decided together to dial internally. The dispatcher sounded slightly concerned, and connected them with the University Security, who said they would send someone over.
Ten long minutes later two young overweight security officers ambled down the hallway. They thought it was a joke. They were laughing about it the whole way over. The floor was dark, clearly nobody was in, but they walked almost to the end of the hallway and peered through the windowed door anyway.
One of them threw up.
The other one called back to University Security, and when Deena and Kent came out into the hallway they were escorted outside. The rest of the building was evacuated.
By the time a third co-worker, Katrina, came in at her usual eight o’clock hour, the building was blocked off by police cars, and yellow tape, and signs saying “This building closed by University Order.” The adjoining hospital remained open, but security guards stood ominously at each of the two nearby entrances. Katrina looked around for someone she knew who could explain what was going on, and when she saw nobody familiar, she checked her cell phone for messages. There were fifteen of them.
The first three were from the City Police, explaining the situation and requesting she call them. The next 12 were from her other co-workers and a classmate of hers that worked in the building.
She called her parents.
