I made my way into the boss’s office. I already knew what it was about. It was a misunderstanding, that’s all. A slippery floor. A slippery floor and bad timing, really really bad timing.

The boss’s secretary sat at her desk outside his door. She was a short woman who had the body of a model but a face made for radio. She was resting her chin on her hand and staring grumpily at the monitor.

“Hi,” I said. “I have to see the boss.”

She looked up at me, sighed and hit a button on her phone. “Mr. Parkman, the pervert’s here to see you.”

“I’m not a pervert,” I said.

“Whatever.” She turned back to her monitor. “He’s waiting.”

I took a second before opening the door. Deep breath in, deep breath out. I couldn’t think of any reasonable explanation apart from the truth and even that was far-fetched. It was the janitor’s fault. Always leaving the floor too wet.

I opened the door.

Parkman was sitting at his desk talking on the phone. He signaled for me to come in and take a seat. Parkman was built like a brick; he had a round face and broad shoulders which made his head look like a bowling ball sitting on a shelf. He wore a red tie and a white shirt that looked a size too small. There was a coffee stain on his tie.

“So.” He hung up the phone. “I’m sure you know why you’re here.”

“I have a good idea.”

He looked at the sheet of paper on his desk.

Sexual Harassment. It was a bad charge. Whether it was true or not those two words will follow me around like a ghost with a slingshot. He was going to fire me and I’d have no chance getting another job with that sort of stigma attached to my name. I decided to try and explain my side of the story first.

“It was an accident,” I said. “Joffy left those damned floors wet again.”

“I don’t see…” He started. I cut him off… Hey, I was going to get fired anyway.

“We were all lobby surfing on the wet floors.”

“Lobby surfing?”

“Yeah, taking a run up and sliding along the wet floors,” I explained. “Anyway, I slipped over and flew head first into the elevator door. Then the door opened and she stepped out.”

“She?”

“Emily.” I said. “I wasn’t laying there waiting to look up her skirt. It was just an accident and really bad timing. I swear. It was just an accident.”

He fiddled with the paper in front of him.

“So, If I have this straight, you were sliding on the wet floor, slipped, hit your head on the elevator, and looked up Emily’s skirt?”

“Accidentally.” I added.

“The thing is,” he said. “I called you up here to discuss the preparations for next months releases. We wanted you to head the team…”

Ah.

* * *

I was back at my desk, trying my best to avoid work, when Dwight came in.

“Still got a job?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“So,” he glanced around my small cubicle. “What color panties was she wearing?”

I looked at him. I was the one labeled a pervert in the office and here was the biggest deviant in the country. I’m surprised he even asked me about my job first.

“Were they black? White? Pink? Was she wearing panties or a thong? Was she wearing anything at all? She wasn’t, was she?” He finally took a breath. “She looks a little kinky. Likes it rough, I say, whips and leather masks and phallic-shaped vegetables.”

“Piss off,” I told him.

“Come on!” he said. “I’ve had to listen to you piss and moan about this girl for months and now you have something I want to hear and you won’t say dick?”

“I didn’t see anything!” I whispered. I was getting the feeling more and more people were listening to us.

“Don’t lie to me boy, I can tell when you’re lying,” he said. “Now tell me, did you get a peek at the panties or a view of the vag?”

I turned to him. “Vag?” I whispered loudly. “What the hell is wrong with you? Get the hell away from me.”

He laughed. I think he enjoyed winding me up. Good friend. “Okay, just tell me the color and I’ll go.”

“No!”

“What color were they?” He poked me in the shoulder.

I snapped.

“They were blue, okay?” I yelled. “Blue freaking panties!”

There was a polite cough from behind me. I knew who it was before I even turned around. I just had that kind of luck.

“Tom wants these done before five,” Emily said and dumped a pile of folders on my desk. She stormed off.

“Well, that’s just perfect.” I turned back to Dwight. “The girl I’ve been trying to get up the nerve to ask out for almost six months now thinks I’m a pervert who looks up girls’ skirts and tells his friends the color of their panties.”

“You’re not having the best day, are you?” Dwight giggled to himself.

“No.”

“Wait here! I know how to fix it,” Dwight said and disappeared.

A few minutes went by and Dwight reappeared with Emily. I tried to say something, but I just stammered.

“So,” Dwight was saying to Emily. “Want to go out with my friend here? Drinks and dinner and such?”

“What?” she turned from Dwight to me. “Are you in high school or something?”

“I…”

“Need your friends to ask girls out for you? You didn’t have trouble, what was it, getting a peek at the panties this morning.”

“I…”

“So what do you say?” Dwight said.

“Maybe,” she said. “Ask me again when Hell freezes over.”

She stormed off again.

Dwight smiled. “You see, good news!”

“Good news? What planet are you from?” I said. “She said no.”

“She said not until Hell freezes over.” He patted me on the shoulder.

“Are you unfamiliar with that phrase?” I asked. “It’s a very definite no.”

“Don’t you watch the news?” he said. “Scientists have been saying for weeks that Hell is about to freeze over.”

* * *

Over the next couple of weeks I tried to avoid Emily, hoping she would forget the incident. Absence makes the heart grow fonder as they say… or other body parts, as Dwight told me. But then everything changed. It was a Wednesday. I slept in late. I had been dreaming of her, again; dreaming of the first time we met.

She had just been transferred to our section and was walking past my desk, her elegant hands holding a large pile of folders. She smiled at me and nodded hello. Something came over me and I had to talk to her. I jumped up and turned to chase after her, kicking my chair out of the way.

To my horror the chair flew toward her. The folders flew into the air and landed on top of the poor woman I had knocked to the ground. I ran over and helped her to her feet.

“What was that?” she rubbed the back of her leg.

“I don’t know,” I lied. I gathered up her folders. “It’s a war zone here, you know.”

She laughed. I handed her the folders. We locked eyes and I swear we had a moment.

“You’re a gem,” she flashed me that gorgeous smile. “Thank you.”
I opened my eyes and looked at the clock. It took a moment for it to register how late I was. People were on their way to work, or just getting in to work, and I was just getting out of bed.

And I wasn’t going anywhere without my coffee.

I clicked on the television while I waited for the water to boil. It was a live news report. A woman in a pant-suit was standing next to some seriously disheveled homeless man. At least that’s what I thought he was at first…

“I’m standing next to Mr. Clive Renton,” the reporter was saying, “who died in a tragic car accident almost three weeks ago…”

Huh?

“Mr. Renton, can you tell us why you’re here today?” She pointed the microphone at Mr. Renton.

“Certainly,” he said, his voice rough. “When I first arrived at Hell, I wondered what everyone was complaining about. It just wasn’t that bad… Like a really hot summer. I came to find out that Hell had been going through a sort of Global Cooling. It had been getting colder and colder for years.”

“The flames were dying?” the reporter put in.

“Exactly,” he said. “Then this morning Hell suddenly froze over.”

“Hell froze over.” the reporter said into the camera.

“Uh… Yeah” the zombie said. “Anyway, we all decided it was too fucking cold to stay put and so we came up here.”

“And how do you suppose you’ll go about integrating yourself back into living society?”

“Easily enough.” The zombie licked his lips. “There’s only one thing we really need.”

“What’s that?”

“BRAINS!!!” the zombie yelled.

He threw himself onto the reporter. His hands closed around her neck. His teeth locked onto her head.

“Oh my god!” I thought. “Emily might go out with me now!”

* * *

Within minutes I was in my car and on the road, weaving between half frozen zombies and their victims, headed for work. I was hoping she would be in at work already. Business stops for no-one, not even the dead and all that corporate motto junk. I hoped she had gotten into work and hadn’t been eaten before I got a chance to…

I swerved around a zombie.

The scene took place in my mind. Me swaggering in like a cowboy after a duel at noon, zombie blood down my shirt from where I fought through them to get to her. I sidle up to her cubicle where she’s hard at work filing reports into manila folders. “Hey baby,” I say. “Hell’s frozen over, how about a drink?” She turns to me, that ‘you’re my hero’ look in her eyes and says…

“BRAINS!!”

It was a zombie. I had just pulled up in the car park and turned off the car. I went to open the door when a zombie slapped against my window.

“BRAINS!” it kept saying. “BRAINS!”

Zombies have one-track minds.

I opened the door hard, hitting the zombie, and slammed it shut again. It stumbled back a few steps and fell on its ass. I slipped over to the passenger seat and got out. I ran for the office doors, dodging two other living-dead brain-eaters on the way. Zombies were pretty slow movers.

The elevator doors opened to my floor. I looked out quickly. There was no one in sight. I took a step out onto the floor and immediately fell on my face.

“Fucking Joffy!” I yelled. Hell had frozen over and he still wasn’t moping the floors properly.

Emily’s cubicle was at the end of the row. I was halfway there before I could see it was empty. I looked around. There was no one in the office. I should have known no one would come in today. Lazy bastards.

So Emily would still be at home. Maybe she had her home address somewhere in her cubicle. An address book or something with a return address on it. I hoped she would stay inside, keeping safe. A tight grip on a weapon, just in case, something like a gun or a bat or a pair of…

“BREASTS!”
I turned and saw Dwight in zombie form. I guess he got into work early and from the fact that zombie-Dwight was wearing a bra over his shirt – he was probably going through people’s personal effects when he was killed.

“BREASTS!”

Dwight had a stronger one track mind than zombies did. He was stumbling toward me, arms outstretched like an old Frankenstein film.

“Hey Bud,” zombie-Dwight said. “What are you doing here? Take the day off like everyone else.”

“Hey zombie-Dwight,” I said. “You don’t know where Emily lives, do you?”

“Alright!” Zombie-Dwight clapped his hands together. “I told you Hell was going to freeze over soon, didn’t I? Yeah, zombie-Dwight is always right.”

“The address?”

“Okay, okay,” he said. “Let me get my trusty little black book.”

* * *

Armed with Emily’s address and a gun I found in the security office, I was back on the road. It was almost midday now and the roads looked like the street from a post-apocalyptic war film. Some of the roads were completely blocked off by crashes and I had to take a detour or two. I banged up my car on a few wrecks here and there, and ran over a few unmoving corpses. And a number of moving corpses as well. My windshield was soon covered with zombie blood.

It took just over a half hour to reach Emily’s house. It was a large two-story house with white paint and a couple of red decorations of fresh zombie blood splattered here and there. It had a trellis running up to the second floor. There were two zombies feeding on a body in the front yard.

“No!” I shouted. It’d be just my luck to finally get a chance with the girl of my dreams only to find her eaten by zombies. Typical.

I jumped out of the car and ran toward the front-lawn feeding frenzy, shouting my lungs out. I was a few steps away from them when they made their move. One zombie got to its feet and turned toward me. It growled loudly and I could see small strips of human flesh hanging from its mouth. I tackled it, smashing its face into the ground until it stopped moving.

“You have something between your teeth.” I said.

“BRAINS!”

I turned; the other zombie was right behind me. It knocked me over with one swing of its arm. He must have been a body builder when he was still alive. I kicked my heel into his nuts as hard as I could. Nothing. Then I remembered the gun. I reached into my pocket and pulled the trigger, firing through my jacket and into the zombie’s head, hitting him square between the eyes. He dropped to the ground with a thud.

I got up and stumbled to the front door. I was trying to swagger, in case she was watching from the window, but my leg hurt when I stood on it. I got the front door and knocked.

“Hello?” A voice came from inside. It was a man’s voice.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m looking for Emily.”

“I’m here,” said another voice. It was her.

“Can we talk?”

“How do I know you’re not a zombie?”

“Zombies don’t knock,” I said.

A lock clicked and the door opened a crack. Two faces appeared.

“What are you doing here?” Emily said.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“What are you doing here?” She repeated.

“You, uh,” I stammered. “You said I should ask you out again when Hell froze over. So, uh, how about drinks?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said, oddly shocked.

“Uh, no…”

“Piss off, pervert!”

“I’d do him,” her friend said.

“Yeah,” Emily laughed, shutting the door in my face. “Maybe if he was the last man on earth.”

The last man on earth… It was a lot of work but at least now I knew what I had to do to get her. I pulled the gun from my pocket and got started.