Wheatley is halfway through the interview when it happens.
It's not going very well- which is to say, it's going about as well as any other job interview he has ever had. He's trying so, so hard to make a good impression, but he feels very sick and the room is far too hot, and he really wishes he wasn't jetlagged and had spent more time reading the Aperture Science mission statement he received in his interview pack, as incomprehensible as it was. He feels like a microbe under a lens, nailed to his chair by the merciless scrutiny of the two middle-managers on the other side of the table.
They make notes and exchange glances and ask terrible questions about how he believes he fits into the company's vision, and for the first time he finds himself wondering what the hell he's going to do if he doesn't get this job. It would be fair to say that he has not exactly thought it through that far. He's travelled three and a half thousand miles and spent practically every penny he had getting here, left everything behind- if they say sorry, not for us, thank you for your time, he is spectacularly stuffed.
Just as he's really starting to panic, it happens. The guy- the dead-pale one on the right, who apologised right off the bat for not being one-hundred-percent- something he had for lunch yesterday- stops halfway through asking Wheatley a particularly nasty question about database software, puts his head down on the table, and moans.
"Craig?" says the woman (who introduced herself as Brenda), putting down her pen and placing a hand on her colleague's shoulder. "Are you okay?"
"Uhh," says Craig.
"Do you- do you want to take a break?" says Wheatley, praying that Craig does. A bit of breathing space would be a gift from Heaven right now. "I-I don't mind, honestly, I can wait-"
"Uuuuhhhhh," says Craig, raising his head, and Wheatley has to admit that he does not look okay at all. He looks worse than Wheatley feels. His pupils are pinpricks in eyes the colour of dishwater, and something dark is trickling from his mouth.
"Oh, my God, Craig, what-" begins Brenda, and then Craig turns his head, and sinks his teeth into her hand.
She screams, a high piercing alarm-tone note that hurts to listen to. Wheatley screams as well, and stumbles backwards out of the too-small office chair, which overturns with a clatter. Craig doesn't scream- his teeth are locked together in Brenda's hand- but he makes a furious garbled howling sound, chewing down as she tries to tear herself free, shaking his head like a terrier with a favourite toy. Blood swells around his teeth and patters across the table, and Brenda beats ineffectually at his head and takes another deep breath, but before she can scream again Craig reaches up with hands curled like claws and rips her throat open.
From start to finish, the whole thing takes about ten seconds. Wheatley backs up against the wall, mouth hanging open, watching as a fine mist of arterial spray jets up above the level of the table, followed by a few last grunting, struggling sounds.
Wahey! cheers a small voice at the back of his head, hysterical with relief. No more interview!
The next moment, things get complicated again. Craig sticks his head up above the level of the table. His mouth is smeared with a lot of reddish goop which used to be inside Brenda, and his pinprick eyes are staring straight at Wheatley.
Wheatley is still prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt- everyone has off-days, and maybe there are complex inter-office politics at work here- maybe this is the culmination of some kind of intense inter-department rivalry that he is totally unaware of. Maybe Brenda had it coming.
He opens his hands and holds them out, trying to sound normal. The notes and papers he brought with him are still scattered across the tabletop, and he makes a show of shoofing them into a little pile.
"Uh- okay, right, well, Craig, uh, I-I can see you're not having the- the best morning, fairly obvious- you know- you know what, I'm just going to pop off now- um, just remembered, nobody's given me the tour yet, so I'll- I'll just go and have a wander, if that's- nonono, it's fine, no need to get up!"
It looks like Craig is committed to being helpful. He lurches upright, groaning open-mouthed through his clotted teeth. A slick of black blood spills down his chin.
"Right," says Wheatley, drawing his little pile of paper protectively to his chest. "Um-"
()~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~()
Fifteen seconds later, he bursts out of the interview room, screaming at the top of his voice, skidding out into the antiseptic grey corridor and slamming the door in the face of the clawing monstrosity that used to be a middle-manager named Craig. There is a small window in the door, so he gets a brilliant close-up view of most of the inside of Craig's cheek and his champing teeth, at least until all the flying spit and snot and gore smears the little window into obscurity.
He backs off from the door, which thumps and rattles in its frame. He has about half a second to feel relieved, but the feeling evaporates very quickly when the handle turns with a clack and Craig barrels out, screaming through a mouthful of Brenda, and comes within an inch of tackling Wheatley to the floor. He has opened the door in about half the time it took Wheatley to do it himself, and he is still pretty lively- he bounces off the wall, leaving a roughly Craig-shaped red smear, and comes at Wheatley in a hurtling, unstoppable way that gives him a violent flashback to the first and last time he ever played rugby in secondary school. Instinct takes over, and he does exactly what he did then, when for some ungodly reason he ended up with the ball, and William Renwick, who was built like a brick shithouse and hated his guts, came at him like a thirteen-year-old Minotaur in a stripy flannel headband. He turns, and runs like hell.
He can hear Craig behind him, thudding feet and snarling and big furious snorkling wet breaths like something awful has happened inside the man's chest, but the sounds recede fast as he pulls ahead. Running, mercifully, is one thing Wheatley can do quite well.
"Where is everyone?" he screams, going into a drifting two-foot skid around a shiny-tiled corner, flailing for balance. There were hundreds of people milling around just an hour ago, when he followed Brenda through the massive lobby and up to the interview room, squillions of Aperture employees bustling back and forth in their white shirts with the neat little shutter-logo on the pocket, even the odd scientist in official-looking white labcoats- but now the place seems to be completely deserted. His last shred of hope that all of this might be some kind of really sneaky, elaborate test of aptitude is evaporating, fast.
Still running, he stuffs the blood-spotted wodge of notes into his jacket pocket and fishes out the fold-out brochure he picked up in the lobby- mostly because it was shiny and had the Aperture logo gloss-printed on the cover- and tries to unfold it as he goes. There's a nasty moment when the map catches the breeze and plasters itself across his face, but he finally manages to fight it into submission, keeps going.
"Lobby... where is the lobbyyy- ah! There you are-"
He snatches a look back over his shoulder. He's alarmed to see that Craig has acquired a friend- Brenda, her badly-chewed neck at a weird angle, is stumbling behind him, her long nicely-manicured nails clutching wildly at thin air.
"Oh-oh, not good, not good-"
Getting to the lobby suddenly seems like the best idea in the world. It's a long way from the surface- the lift down took ages- but there was a security guard down there, and this is America, where- if movies are to be relied upon- security guards have guns.
He takes the stairs three at a time, leaves the big glass revolving door at the bottom spinning like a capstan, and skids into the lobby, cramming the map into his inside jacket pocket. At a glance, everything in the lobby looks pretty much the way it did before- the vast expanse of shiny floor, the giant sweep of the mural across one wall, fifty feet of striking, stylised scenes which depict the last hundred years of Aperture Science, the digital display boards rippling with information- but there isn't a soul around, and all the boards now read the same thing- EMERGENCY PROTOCOL 401- PLEASE STAND BY.
Wheatley doesn't have a clue what EMERGENCY PROTOCOL 401 is, but he does know that standing by is probably the worst suggestion anyone could offer right now.
Shouting, on the other hand, is a great idea, always a classic. He takes a deep breath.
"HELP! He-hello? Anyone there? Somebody help me!"
"Attention," says a calm voice, booming out overhead through the deserted lobby. "Security breach in sectors Alpha throughhhzzZZTTCHHHstaff please proceed to the nearest evacuation point. This is not a drill. Atención, violación de seguridaden..."
"Nearest evacuation point!" yells Wheatley, sprinting across the squeaky tiles. "Brilliant, 'cept, where is it?"
There is a long wet scarlet swathe painted across the floor, trailing in the direction of the security booth. Wheatley doesn't notice until he's almost on top of it, and he has to slam the brakes on to stop himself slipping in it and falling flat on his arse. He grabs the front of the booth with both hands, peers over the counter, then turns away and retches noisily into a potted plant. One thing's for certain- nobody's going to be getting any help from security today.
"Uuurrrhhh," says something behind him, and he swallows bile and ducks frantically away, which would have worked, except this time he really does slip in the slick of blood, and he goes down, hard. He hears the lens of his glasses go- crack- and he lands on his back in a flurry of notepaper, knocking the wind out of himself. He's still struggling to draw a proper breath when his old friend Craig hurls himself on top of him and tries to remove his nose with his teeth. Wheatley screams in absolute terror and elbows him in the face, and there is a horrible crunch from somewhere in the area of the man's nose-
"sorrysorryI'msorry-"
-but it doesn't seem to put Craig off in the slightest, he continues to scream and claw at Wheatley's face and arms, his teeth clacking together under his newly-shattered nose, and through the inch of space that isn't full of flailing manager Wheatley can see Brenda's bloody, laddered stockings limping closer.
This really is not how Wheatley envisioned this morning going, not even in the worst-case scenario. He is lost in a vast, apparently-deserted underground death-trap three and a half thousand miles away from home, his only smart suit-jacket is probably a write-off, and he is about to get his face eaten by a psychotic middle-manager named Craig.
"Oh no no god please nononono I don't want to die I don't want to-"
BLAM.
The shot is so close that his ears pop and plunge him into a muffled underwater world, stuffed with shattered, whining echoes. He sees Craig go flying sideways, the left side of his head reduced to a reddish-grey pulp that splatters against the side of the security booth like a handful of raspberry jelly. As he scrabbles backwards, Brenda comes stumbling towards him, talons outstretched- but a second BLAM obliterates her knees and leaves her dragging herself in angry little circles on the ground, painting a bloody Spirograph swirl as she goes.
Wheatley looks up.
She's standing about ten feet away, and for a horrible moment he thinks that she's got it too, whatever it is, because she's sickly-pale in a dingy hospital gown and grey-blue under the eyes, and her hair is unravelling from her ponytail in knotted, bloody strings, but she's standing quite still, and her eyes are clear. She's holding the security guard's gun- the first actual real-life not-even-holstered gun he has ever seen in his life- still smoking, in both hands, levelled evenly at the tiles, and looking at him across the carnage she's created on the lobby floor with a small crease between her eyebrows.
He lets out a shaky breath that's half complete unbridled relief and half bewildered awe, and pulls himself to his feet. His hearing is slowly coming back, and his own heartbeat is a racing gallop in his ears.
"Ohhhhh man alive I thought I'd had it then- thought I was a total goner- nice- um- nice shooting there, with, with your gun- thank-"
"Blauuughhh," interrupts Brenda, suddenly, managing to claw up onto all fours. In the space of half a second, the young woman raises the gun and- BLAM- laminates her head across the tiles.
"-you," squeaks Wheatley, as Brenda collapses, wetly, in a heap.
Before he can move, she steps over the remains of Brenda and strides fast across the space between them, and without any prevarication or warning whatsoever sticks the muzzle or the barrel or whatever it is- he's not a gun expert, it's the part the bullet comes out of- directly into his throat, just below the angle of his chin.
Wheatley gulps, his adam's apple bobbing like a snooker ball in a sock. What he is experiencing right now is actually not so much terror as an extreme form of culture shock. In an attempt to stop his hopes from rising too high, he has spent the last two months telling himself sternly that real life does not conform to the sort of exotic expectations you get from watching too many movies, and yet he has been in America less than twenty-four hours, and a half-naked, undeniably attractive young woman is jamming a gun into his neck. There's no getting away from it; this sort of thing just doesn't happen in Bristol.
"Whoah! Whoah, steady, steady, no need for- for- well, what-whatever you've got in mind, think I can safely say there's no need for it! At all. I promise I'm not a- a- you know- raaahr, arrgh, biting- one of them- that was an impression, by the way! That wasn't me doing it for real! Oh, God don't shoot me-"
Her eyes are fixed on him, cold, impassive, and he has a horrifying conviction that if she pulls the trigger at this point, pulls the trigger and watches his head explode like a fleshy piñata, her expression won't change in the slightest. She probably won't even flinch.
She lets the gun drift downwards, over his collar, whispering against the cheap cotton of his shirt all the way down to the little grey Aperture logo on his pocket. He'd worn it as a good-luck charm, and because he'd thought it would project a suitably keen sort of impression, but it looks like she's found a third use for it. Right over his heart, it makes a brilliant target.
Shaking like a leaf, he screws his eyes shut, and waits.
The next thing he knows, the pressure lifts and he hears footsteps, light and determined, echoing off across the tiles. He opens his eyes and sees her walking away from him, gun down two-handed at her side, towards the other end of the long mural.
Wheatley suffers a nasty moment of Catch-22 panic. He's scared stiff of her, but he quickly realises his fear of getting shot by her is next to nothing compared to the terrifying prospect of being all alone down here with who-knows-how-many screaming biting murderous ghouls roaming around- without her.
"Oi! Hey, wait- wait for me! Hey, listen, I've- I've got a map!"