The Party

The New York financial district was no stranger to hosting parties — parties happen where the money is. The International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB) had just wrapped a week-long symposium updating top auditing firms on next year’s best practices. To celebrate the end of the stuffy seminars, they threw a formal party that quickly loosened up. Even accountants love booze.

Yani Marcas was attending for the first time. A young financial services prodigy, she’d started young in banking and earned a reputation for seeing what others missed — investigating and fixing messy financial disasters for demanding clients. This year her firm’s managing partner had brought her along specifically to network ... and to be seen. She was one of the hottest women in the room, physically and professionally, and he knew it. He was using her as marketing. It wasn’t the first time she’d been paraded to make the men drool, but this time there would be no wandering hands. The legal mess at her former employer had put an end to that.

She moved gracefully through the crowd in her black open-toe Jimmy Choo sandals — four-inch strappy heels that made her 5’7” and turned every step into a statement. They weren’t comfortable, but they were worth every penny. Her toned legs and light olive skin (a gift from her Mexican mother) drew eyes upward to the black sparkly little black dress. The asymmetrical hem teased just enough thigh while staying classy. The structured bandeau top with delicate spaghetti straps hugged her modest C-cup breasts and left her flawless shoulders and neck bare, framing her pretty face and long, beautiful black hair.

She kept a careful eye on the room, steering clear of the African accountants’ clique — she’d heard too many ugly stories about them. They were almost as bad as the Japanese groups, from what she’d been told.

The Collapse

Yani had never really thought about the smell of fear before tonight. Now it filled the crowded elevator, thick and sour.

The first explosions shattered the party’s fragile good mood. Everyone rushed to the floor-to-ceiling glass walls of the New York Law Institute, staring out at the glowing skyline. Thick smoke poured from the New York Stock Exchange. Phones came out. Instagram streams showed Antifa-style militants in red armbands taking credit and live-streaming the horror — stock traders dragged out and executed, a late-night secretary hauled screaming into the street, her dress shoved up around her waist, bruised breasts exposed, blood running down her legs after being violated by the mob.

Yani’s stomach twisted. Staying here was suicide. With funding cuts, the police were nowhere near capable of responding in time, and federal forces would take far too long. She didn’t yet know this was only the opening strike — neo-communist cells hitting financial districts on both coasts, armed with weapons raided from National Guard armories. Coastal America versus Middle America. A new civil war.

She wasn’t the only one who understood the danger. The smarter people were already bolting for the elevators. She squeezed into the second one, packed in like a sardine, heart hammering as she stared at her phone maps. More streams flooded in — violence spreading beyond the financial district. Roads were being cut off fast.

She’d taken a ride app to the party, she’d be getting no lyfts in a riot. She fled the building on foot and grabbed the first sidewalk e-scooter she saw. Balancing in four-inch heels was torture — her calves burned as she raced toward the subway a few blocks away. She hoped one farther away would be safer than the one nearest the building.

Navigating through other panic’d drivers was dangerous, but it only got worse.

Half a block from the station, thick black smoke billowed up the stairs. No escape there.

Mean Streets

It looked like she wasn’t going to get out that way. In her mind she tried to see any other ways out tonight, but it was too unpredictable. She’d need a place to bunker down — that’s when she remembered the old bomb shelter under the HSBC bank, next door to the law institute.

She worked to turn the scooter around amidst the panicked and stuck traffic, weaving back the way she’d come between the cars. As she navigated the chaos, she forced herself to remember the details of that bunker.

A year earlier she’d worked in that very building auditing their property management contracting company for the building owner. As she was going through the paperwork for the historical expenses versus current, she found out the building had a bunker that they’d written off years ago. Out of curiosity, she came in on a weekend and found it on B2. It was very dusty, but she was able to work her way past the junk stored in front of the door and get into an antechamber to the vault door. A little pocking around the door and she found the catch that freed up the wheel. She spun it and could hear the dogs unlatch, but could not get it to open fully. The ancient steel laminated bunker door was too heavy for her to make it budge. She really wanted to get in there, because before they wrote it off, they’d apparently re-stocked it back in the 90s during the Gulf War, expecting reprisals from the terrorists of that age. Oddly, even after Nine-Eleven, they still did not refurbish and reopen the bunker officially. At least according to the records and invoices, but the early 90s restocking had included shelf-stable food and water.

She’d still need help getting in though, as she was no longer an employee. Fortunately, while there she’d made friends with a guy in the building maintenance crew named Tyrone. He was assigned to her to help move file boxes and unlock sealed storage for said files. While they worked, it was clear he’d been hot for her. She decided he was handsome enough. A younger 20-something black man, strong with dark skin. However, she’d kept him on the friends-only list. She had no time for romance in contract auditing work.

She called him while trying to stay stable on the scooter. Struggling through the sound of the wind while trying to drive one handed, she got her message through and he agreed to meet her at the loading dock personnel door.

Hopeful for one brief moment, trying to put her phone away to use both hands, she glanced down at the wrong second — hitting a pothole and flying off the scooter. She slid hard, her dress and legs and palms getting scraped raw. Her phone was shattered. Without it’s payment app, the scooter was dead.

Mentally pushing down her rising panic, she got up and started to hobble the last block and a half, clip-clopping in her heels like a roughed-up hooker. The oncoming pedestrians avoided the bloody, crazy-looking woman with determined brown eyes that already knew she was going ton the wrong way, towards the mob.

The final half block was when her steel grip on panic cracked. The mob poured around the corner. She ducked into a trash-filled service alley, hiding behind a dumpster. The spot was already occupied by two filthy homeless men.